Designing optimal crop management strategies

The identification of optimal crop management strategies at farm and enterprise levels presents special difficulties -- in particular, the nature of the farm itself, operating in an environment defined by biophysical, socioeconomic, and politico-cultural variables, the often intractable effects of human agency, and, in an ecoregional context, the problems of defining appropriate spatial and temporal scales for analysis; these all combine to form a perplexing problem domain. We illustrate the potential use of simulation models in addressing some of these problems with respect to two case studies: season-specific enterprise management in the midaltitude maize ecology of central Malawi and an analysis of management options facing a hillside smallholder induced to move out of coffee production in the lower Andes of central Colombia. The first case study shows that simple analyses can provide season- and regionspecific management recommendations on input use that could improve productivity and stabilise economic returns. The second highlights the importance of price and weather risk in analysing management options and their impact on farm viability eng