Agricultural systems in the Western Australian wheatbelt are increasingly moving towards specialist crop production due to elevated cereal prices, depressed markets for livestock products, and ongoing labour scarcity. However, the profitability of crop-only farms is threatened by increasing...

Lucerne (Medicago sativa L.) helps to prevent soil salinisation in the Western Australian Wheatbelt by reducing recharge to saline water tables. There is broad consensus, though, that it is not sufficiently profitable to motivate producers to plant it at the intensity at which considerable...

Simulation models are valuable tools in the analysis of complex, highly constrained economic systems unsuitable for solution by mathematical programming. However, model size may hamper the efforts of practitioners to efficiently identify the most valuable configurations. This paper investigates...

Use of lucerne (Medicago sativa L.) pastures in crop rotations has been proposed as a method to enhance weed management options for growers facing herbicide resistance in Western Australia. An existing model for analysing herbicide resistance in the important crop weed annual ryegrass (Lolium...

This short paper provides a simple introduction on how a simulation model implemented in Microsoft Excel® can be optimised using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming and the compressed simulated annealing algorithm (Ohlmann et al., 2004; Ohlmann and Thomas, 2007). The standard simulated...

Many important problems in agricultural and natural resource economics concern an intertemporal choice between alternate dynamic systems. This significance has motivated a theoretical literature generalizing the necessary conditions of Optimal Control Theory to multiple-phase problems. However,...