Improving Crop Yields Through Better Planting Schedules

Improvement of agricultural productivity is often regarded as a solution to the impending food shortage problem in the world. In this paper we develop a novel model for seed growth using plant physiology literature and embed that in an optimal seed planting problem for a farmer facing rainfall uncertainty and planting capacity constraints. We establish the optimal planting schedule given the soil water content, planting capacity, and future rainfall uncertainty. In our computational study, we use field weather data from Southern Africa in a real size large-scale problem and demonstrate significant relative crop production advantage of the optimal planting schedule over commonly used heuristics in practice.