Collaboration and optimization in farmland exchanges.

To keep businesses competitive in world markets, the number of farms in most countries is decreasing while farm size is increasing, and parcels making up the farm area are extremely fragmented. It is common for farms to expand faster than available arable land near the farm center, leading to longer distances between the farm center and field areas. Consequently, logistic costs increase and affect the farm's profitability and the environment. Moreover, there is often substantial overlap between different farms, which implies that it is possible for farmers to collaborate with each other. We developed and proposed three optimization models to describe different levels of collaboration and sharing restrictions. Many practical considerations need to be weighed, such as the soil type and crops used. We collected detailed information on farms, parcels, and cost drivers in seven large instances for our case study in Sweden. One instance had 1431 farms and 32,091 parcels with 96 crop types. The resulting optimization models were very large; special pre‐processing and optimization techniques were developed for their solutions. The theoretical potential for collaboration in logistic cost reduction was very large, ranging from approximately 10% to 50% depending on the form of the collaboration. Because a large part of costs comes from less use of diesel for transport resources, the reduction in cost is directly related to a reduction in CO2 emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]