In this paper we examine whether there is room for improvement in farm program decisions through the integration of formal mathematical optimisation into the planning process. Probing the potential for improvement, we investigate the cases of four Brandenburg cash crop farms over the last six...

Regulatory policies often aim to steer the behaviour of economic agents by changing their framework conditions. Assessing the impact of such policies requires forecasts of how humans adapt to changes in their economic environment. A prerequisite for a meaningful policy impact analysis is a...

This paper presents a regional land-use model that conceives farms as independent agents aiming at maximum individual utility. Farm agents optimize their utility with the help of a linear-programming algorithm that takes into account natural, economic and personal restrictions. Interactions...

'Farming for Nature', a relatively new policy instrument being tried out in the Netherlands, is evaluated. The concept has been designed to allow dairy farmers to improve nature conservation on their farms. Under the scheme, no manure, fertilizer, or feed - concentrates or roughage - may be...

In this paper we analyse the impact of the EU multi-level co-financing system on regional policy-making and priority setting taking the case of the agri-environmental programme of Saxony-Anhalt. The implications of several co-financing scenarios are analysed and compared to respective lump-sum...

Optimization has been recognized as a powerful tool in teaching and research for a long time. In spite of its well known problem solving capacity, some methodological obstacles have persisted over the years. The main problem is that stochastic variables and their correlations cannot be...

Planning agricultural and environmental programmes has become a complex task. In this paper we show how interactive programming can help to solve such complex policy decision-making problems. The basic linear programming model is implemented with Excel. We show, for a hypothetical agricultural...

Under the condition of significant changes in the framework of EU Agricultural Policy Agro-Environmental Programmes are evaluated in this paper. The MEKA-Programme of Baden-Württemberg and the KULAP-Programme of Brandenburg, both measures under the EU-Regulation VO (EWG) 2078/92 of 1992, are...

This article considers the economic and environmental (in terms of CO2) effects of national energy policies in a European Single Market for electricity. It was found that the combined CO2/Energy-tax proposed by the European Commission would be able to stabilise the current volume of...

A batch sequencing model with sequence-dependent setup-times and -costs is used to compare modelling and solving with two different general solvers. "Conceptual models" are implemented in the constraint propagation / logic programming language CHARME and solved with the PROLOG inference engine....