Decision Making in Vegetables Production: Araucania’s Plan Predial (Chile) as a Model

Plan Predial (planpredial.inia.cl) is an interactive platform for La Araucanía region, Chile, which allows the user to efficiently plan the use of available property resources by generating technical–economic information that facilitates decision-making in a productive system. The need for its construction arises from permanent consultations from producers and technicians in the horticultural sector. It is free to access, which seeks to answer what, how much, when and how to produce, in different agricultural areas. For the development, technical information from primary and secondary sources in thirty-two species were considered. Models according to agro-ecological zone, crop rotation, history of production, harvest timing, sales format, crop yield, water demand, price series, resources, reinvestment, and start of work. Field validations were carried out for varieties, growing time and labour costs. A total of hundred fifty-six agronomic management alternatives were generated, combining the previous variables. The platform was built, to which extension agents and farmers can freely access as users to plan their production systems. This platform optimizes in real time, and delivers suggestions for crop management options, which contain the activities to be carried out in each stage of crop production, the minimum area to be cultivated, the Gantt chart with dates and duration of each activity, direct and indirect costs, and gross margin. With all this information, the minimum productive economic unit (UEMP) is obtained, expressed as an area from which profits are generated. It can be accessed from a computer or mobile device, through a browser. For its development, the CentOS 7 Operating System, JAVA 1.7, Tomcat 7 servlet container, PostgreSQL Database 9.6 and Matlab R2015a (Matlab Compiler Runtime) were used. Optimization was implemented in MATLAB, specifically, using the MILP intlinpro mixed-integer programming function, which searches for the minimum of a specific problem subject to certain restrictions.