An MCDM approach to production analysis: An application to irrigated farms in southern Spain

The analysis of the decision-making process in agricultural enterprises is approached with the development of a methodology based upon two stages: firstly we enlarge our knowledge of the system under study by performing grouping operation -cluster analysis -of the farm enterprises. The result of this stage is to classify farms according to crop pattern, which is the basis for the second stage of analysis: the system is studied by solving a weighted goal programming to approach the weights given by different farmers to the objectives of the decision process. This methodology is applied to two nearby but different irrigation units in Southern Spain, and we found that there was an important degree of heterogeneity in production plans explained by differences in objective weights. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.