ENTERPRISE DECISION MODELS FOR CITRUS HARVESTING. AN APPLICATION FOR THE WASHINGTON NAVEL VARIETY.

He objectives of this study are:1. Optimizing of harvesting date under a certainty context, for one year only, and for two consecutive years, including time opportunity cost. 2. Generalization of the model for a period of n years. 3. Planning of hervesting under risk.

Data on productions were experimentally collected, and as what prices refers, the monthly mean prices were deducted from a 10-year series whose behaviour was analysed.

For the analysis under a certainty context the overtime productions functions and overtime returns function were determined.

For the planning under risk we determined dates and percentage of crop that had to be harvested by applying the portfolio analysis method.

The following results were obtained:

• The first week of March is the time when returns are optimized.
• The overtime opportunity cost-according to harvesting delay-range between 0 and 30 percent of the production of the following year.

Farm planning of harvesting under risk produces higher percentages of sales in November for lower levels of returns. To abtain higher levels of returns, higher amounts of fruit must be sold in March.

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