OPTIMIZED AGRICULTURAL PLANNING OF SUGARCANE USING LINEAR PROGRAMMING

Optimized agricultural planning is a fundamental activity in business profitability because it can increase the returns from an operation with low additional costs. Nonetheless, the use of operations research adapted to sugarcane plantation management is still limited, resulting in decision-making at management level being primarily empirical. The goal of this work was to develop an optimized planning model for sugarcane farming using a linear programming tool. The program language used was General Algebraic Modelling System (GAMS) as this system was seen to be an excellent tool to allow profit maximization and harvesting time schedule optimization in the sugar mill studied. The results presented support this optimized planning model as being a very useful tool for sugarcane management.