Book Description

The focus of this research is to operationalize the concept of sustainability by developing a decision support method which integrates measures of achievement in the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of farming. The decision support method combines multiple attribute decision making (MADM) with fuzzy logic. Multiple attribute decision making is used to model decisions characterized by multiple, conflicting objectives. Vague, imprecise, and ambiguous information is incorporated into the decision process by the use of linguistic variables. The fuzzy MADM model was applied to the problem of evaluating farming systems in Missouri. A representative farm was used to construct ten crop-livestock farming systems. Each farming system represents a different allocation of resources among crop and livestock components. The ten farming systems were evaluated on the basis of eleven economic, environmental, and social criteria. The criteria were selected by Missouri farmers and social scientists. Attribute weights were elicited from three Missouri farmers using a hierarchical weighting method. The fuzzy MADM model fully ranked the decision alternatives relative to the preferences of decision makers. Additional hypothetical farming systems and farmers with different preferences were used to test how preference information is reflected in the final ranks. Results indicate that intra-attribute and inter-attribute preference information is preserved. In addition, this method is not subject to the rank reversal problem of the analytic hierarchy process. The problem of converting non-commensurate data to a common numerical scale, inherent in other MADM approaches, is solved by the use of linguistic variables. It is concluded that the fuzzy MADM model can improve decision making on the farm--the end goal of this research.