ENGINEERING ASSIGNMENT SOLVING A PROBLEM

In order to move out of a cycle of subsistence farming and into a cycle of surplus farming in rural Africa and elsewhere, yield intensification methods must be employed, and there must be markets to absorb the surplus production.

Programs are currently being implemented that attempt to be catalysts for this transformation in Mozambique, one of the poorest nations on earth.

The crop focus is on cassava, a drought resistant tuber that has many food and industrial applications. Dadtco ( http://www.dadtco.nl/ ), in conjunction with IFDC ( https://ifdc.org/tag/cassava/s ) and SAB Miller (http://www.africanbusinessreview.co.za/money_matters/sabmiller-aims-to-win-over-home-brewers-with-cassava-beer ) is combining value chain development, mechanization for farming and processing, new product development and market creation to create opportunity to break the subsistence cycle and replace with a sustainable cycle of surplus.

One obstacle to this implementation is hesitance to plant cash crops in place of food crops for fear that they (farmers) will run out of food before cash is obtained from the cash crop. To help overcome this obstacle, you are asked to develop a model that will help farmers decide how much of each crop to plant so that they can maximize their cash earned while still meeting the nutritional needs of the farm family.

Specifically, you are asked to develop a model that, given information about the economics, constraints and resources available to a farmer, will determine the amount of land that should optimally be devoted to each crop.

One of the critical resources is ‘cash on hand at the beginning of a planting season’ that can be used towards intensification cost like mechanization, fertilizer and hybrid seeds or cuttings. You are to develop a generic model, then iteratively apply that model to 4 successive growing seasons, where after the initial season, the cash on hand at the beginning will be the cash that was generated from the previous growing cycle. By applying the model over 4 seasons, you are hoping to demonstrate the beginning of a cycle of surplus (i.e., more cash generated by each cycle than there was available at the beginning of the cycle. For simplicity, we take a growing season to be one year, though in actuality it varies for different crops, locations, rain patterns, etc.

Requirements:

-Amount of non-cash crops grown must be sufficient to meet nutritional requirements of farmer family for a year, with an extra 15% buffer to cover spoilage, long term guests/relatives that could join the household. Also, an extra 10% needs to be grown to be used as seed/cuttings for the next growing season.

-Intensification Practices are only utilized for cassava cash-crop production, and may be limited by initial funds available to implement intensification. Traditional (low yield) cassava can also be sold as a cash crop and does not incur intensification costs or attain intensification yields.

Yield, Intensification Costs and initial cash available are provided in the table below. You will need to perform research (and document sources) to determine some crop nutritional values/yields, to determine and appropriate values to use for average farm size and average family size in Mozambique.

Beginning cash on hand is equal to $(NetID)/500

Questions

Report your variable definitions, formulation and model results.

Interpret your results to provide answers to the following:

-What is the cash on hand at the end of year1, year 2, year 3 and year 4?

-What amount of each of the crops is grown in years 1, 2, 3 and 4?

-What would the impact on your year one solution be if the Fat content of bananas was 25 g per kg instead of 0g per kg?

-What would the impact be of doubling the cash on hand at time zero?

-What would the impact be if the market price for cassava was reduced by 25%?