Decision support system for crop planning and equipment selection

Stand-alone executable computer software has been developed for the purpose of crop planning and equipment selection in crop production based on the farming situation in Sri Lanka using FoxPro 2.0 Command Language. The program extracts the comprehensive information about the farming situation from three data files: first, general socio-economic factors, second, the commonly grown crops in the region and associated inputs and outputs with their operation calendars and third, all the equipment available to perform these operations with necessary details. All these data can be checked or edited by the user. In addition, the user can add or remove the records to/from these two databases when it necessitates modifications usually coming with time. The software first suggests the most profitable crop-area combination within the availability of total land, monthly labor, seasonal operating capital and seasonal water supply which are specified by the user. Using the resulting crop plan as the input or a user-defined input, it predicts the optimum power system feasible to the situation and the best combinations of human, animal- and power-driven equipment for various operations. Finally, based on the selected main power system, it produces a report which includes total output, cost and profit in annual, seasonal and per unit crop area bases. Also, it gives the equipment system for all operations and monthly labor demand for all the farming activities. This computer program is developed with special attention to Sri Lanka situation. Therefore, it necessitates initial modifications to use in another environment. The program was evaluated with two farms in Sri Lanka having 1.0 ha and 2.0 ha holding sizes with canal irrigation system and a hypothetical farm using water pump. Sensitivity of the price yield of rice which is the staple crop was also examined to see how the optimum crop plan is effected by the typical variation of these two parameters. The optimum equipment system was not effected by fluctuations of yield and prices since optimization is being done based on the least cost system.