Profitability and Production Requirements for Land Use Allocation of Farming and Forestry Land

This paper describes the Gestop approach to calculate the profitability or production requirements of agricultural and forestry products. Once primed with data for a given geographical area concerning the expected production volumes of the products considered per unit area of land, and with the prices of products and costs of machinery and raw materials, and given a value for one of a set of possible constraining factors (available land area, production volume, desired profit, initial investment or available labour), a Gestop system calculates the values of all the other members of this set of variables, applying accounting methods appropriate to each kind of product. It thus greatly facilitates comparisons among products as regards their viability, and would therefore be useful in land use allocation projects and consultancy practices when limitations on the availability of land, labour, production and/or investment resources constitute important constraints.