Managing Weather and Price Risk on a Farm Level: A case study of linear programming in optimization of farm production structure

Weather and price risks have always been a significant factor in agriculture. Although, on academic level, a number of advanced methods of reducing the above risks is known, polish farmers definitely do not use them. During long history of agriculture, however, heuristic methods regarding the weather risk have been developed by them. Those methods can be embedded while constructing linear models of farms. This paper presents results obtained from a practical application of a newly developed linear farm model generator. It has been used to analyze profitability of the “Plant Breeding and Acclimatization Experimental Station” in Radzikow in Poland, while taking the weather and price risks in consideration.