| Article ID: | iaor20091095 |
| Country: | United Kingdom |
| Volume: | 92 |
| Issue: | 1/3 |
| Start Page Number: | 266 |
| End Page Number: | 294 |
| Publication Date: | Jan 2007 |
| Journal: | Agricultural Systems |
| Authors: | Cembali Tiziano, Folwell Raymond J., Huffaker Ray G., McCluskey Jill J., Wandschneider Phil R. |
| Keywords: | simulation: applications |
Asparagus is harvested daily during the production season. The adoption of harvesting strategies less or more frequent than the traditional 24-h strategy has not occurred because of problems in hiring manual labor. A model that predicts daily harvest and the impact of different harvesting strategies was developed. This paper presents a bioeconomic model, capable of predicting daily asparagus harvests, composed by different mathematical functions: emergence, density dynamics, spear growth, diameter, weight, carbohydrates reserve dynamics, and profit. The bioeconomic model was used to simulate yield, number of harvests, profit, and the total cost of harvest for every year in the period 1989–2004. A simulation with the minimum wage harvesting constraint was developed and is labeled as the constrained model.