The Interview

My group and I headed over to LW's Friday evening. We had a good interview. One of my worries about this project was that this famer crop mix decision would be trivial, not complicated enough for there to be any benefit to applying our optimization methods. That fear was soundly laid to rest. There are a myriad of factors that affect the decision, and some of them are hard to get ahold of.

Let me see if I can list some. Equipment considerations, soil type, marketing (that's going to be hard to quantify), labor (some require lots of hand labor, some don't), spraying. Tons of stuff. This is going to be lots of fun trying to sort this all out and design a manageable, yet accurate, model.

One of the things we wanted to do was make a piece of software that could be useful to a variety of farmers. That's going to be difficult to do, because after talking to LW, you get a sense of just how much farmers vary stratically. A challenge, for sure.

He surely loves his occupation. His wife is delightful too. She came home from shopping when we were getting close to done with our meeting. LW suggested, laughing, that we try to make a model explaining how the more you spend the more you save, which seems to be his wife's strategy.