Letter to the Editor—Application of Operations Research in Farm Operations and Agricultural Marketing

Operations Research, as generally conceived in agriculture, emphasizes interdisciplinary endeavor and quantitative measurement. Farm operations involve a wide range of problems, and agricultural marketing concepts are much broader than those of business marketing. Thus, it is difficult to delineate the area of application of OR in agriculture. Yet, agriculturalists are using OR and this note is an attempt to (a) sketch the historical perspective of quantitative measures in agricultural economics research, (b) catalog recent work of agricultural economists which is considered by them to be OR, (c) list a few problems in application of OR which we feel in a sense to be unique with agriculture, and (d) speculate briefly on the future of OR in agriculture.