COST REDUCTION IN THE PLANTATION OF LONGAN AND MANGO BY IMPLEMENTING THE INTEGRATED AGRICULTURAL COST REDUCTION MODEL AND INTEGER LINEAR PROGRAMING OPTIMIZATION MODEL: CASE STUDY OF PLANTATION AREA IN SAKAEO PROVINCE, THAILAND

Abstract

This research project has a main purpose to reduce the total cost of agricultural plantation in Sakaeo province by implementing the concept of Integrated Agricultural Cost Reduction Model(IACR) for managing the fertilizer and agrichemical costs, and the Integer Linear Programming Model(ILP) for controlling the labor cost. In addition, researcher and team gather some useful information from two groups of cultivator, which are the cultivator of Longan plantation and the cultivator of Mango plantation. The final result reveals that the total cost of fertilizer and agrichemical products are reduced by 4.28 percent or 9,580 THB for Longan plantation and reduced by 5.79 percent or 13,159 THB for Mango plantation. At the same time, the total cost of cultivating labors is slightly decreased also, which are approximately 21-30 percent from the existing cost. Therefore, the concept of Integrated Agricultural Cost Reduction Model(IACR) and the Integer Linear Programming Model(ILP) are exactly useful for reducing and controlling the total cost of agricultural plantation around 27-34 percent.