The machinery selection decision confronting agricultural producers is recurrent, complex, and important. Machinery selection is complicated by many interrelated factors, which jointly determine the final impact of a particular machinery decision on farm profitability. Among the more important factors that must be considered in the selection of machinery are (a) weather conditions, (b) the effect of timeliness of operation on yield, (c) availability of labor at crucial times of the year, and (d) the farmer's goals and attitudes toward risk. The interaction among all these factors has a considerable influence on crop planning and machinery selection, and therefore these two decisions must be considered simultaneously.
The importance and complexity of the machinery selection problem has resulted in numerous efforts to develop analytical models, which will either yield generalizable selection guidelines or be useful directly by the farmer as a decision aid. The approaches that have been used are (a) calculator-type programs (17); (b) simulations (3, 10); and (c) mathematical programming approaches (4, 11). To date, many sophisticated models have been developed. _______, to the authors' knowledge, only linear programming approaches have had extensive application and farmer use (2).
This paper _______________. an attempt to develop an alternative analytical approach to machinery selection problems. This alternative approach _______________ provide agricultural advisors with a reliable means to help farmers make good decisions in selecting their machinery.
