A Probabilistic approach to optimal orchard management

Abstract

The formal study of orchard management in which an orchard is viewed as a jointly determined ecological-economic system is still in its infancy. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new way of looking at the problem of orchard management that has three distinct advantages to it. First, we model an orchard as an ecological-economic system. Second, consistent with the normal behavior of such systems, our approach to the orchard management problem is explicitly probabilistic. Finally, the optimization problem we suggest an orchard manager solve is one in which an economic criterion function is minimized subject to an ecological constraint. This constraint says that the probability that the orchard under study is not Holling resilient is at most as large as an exogenously given value.