The Objectives and Priorities for the Azorean Dairy Farmers’ Decisions - The Agricultural Economics of the 21st Century - page 149

Conclusions
Various operative techniques of Multi-Criteria decision with the development
of mathematical programming models, which integrate technical and eco-
nomic data characteristic of regional activities, have been revealed to be
“tools” of great importance for the development of decision support systems
for managers and farmers.
This observation assumes greater importance when objectives are defined
and have a strong degree of conflict among them. This is the case of the
Azorean farmer's decision made with conflictive objectives such as profit
maximization, risk minimization, labor seasonality minimization, leisure
maximization, and deviations to the goal of total labor minimization.
Using L 1 criterion and the Manhattan utility function, a surrogate utility
function for the Azorean dairy farms that seems to be consistent with the real
preferences revealed by farmers was estimated. The three groups selected
according to different systems grazing (low, medium, and high intensity)
differ in objective weights. Only one group (the less intensity system grazing,
characterized by less than 1.4 animal per ha) weight the economic objective
(profit maximization). The other two groups, more intensive (animals per ha
greater than 1.4), prioritize other objective like labor and land use.
This conclusion is unexpected as profit does not seems to be the priority in
the Azorean farmer's decision as already observed by Amador et al. ( 1998 )
and Rodr ´ guez Oca ˜ a( 1996 ). However, we can conclude that there might be
other factors (not economical ones) that constrain the decision making
process.

Appendix

MAX X

15

Objective 1 ðÞ: MAX MB ¼ X i MB i ,

i ¼ 1

MIN X

7

Objective 2 ðÞ: MIN MOTAD ¼ N k

k¼ 1

MIN X

6

Objective 3 ðÞ: MIN EST ¼ n j þ p j

j¼ 1