An optimization model for the management of a South African game ranch

Management of a game ranch is an important issue as many game ranches operate on meagre profits, and some even at a loss, as their part-time owners subsidize the ranches from other sources of income. In this paper, we address the sustainable game ranching problem in a South African context through an optimization model. To obtain a faithful picture of reality, the model includes conflicting objective functions, and takes into account the fact that annual rainfall is known only stochastically. An approach for solving the resulting multi objective integer linear stochastic program is discussed and illustrated by means of a numerical example from a Northern Cape ranch.