An Interregional Competition Study of Utah Agriculture Using the Linear Programming Technique

The purposes of this paper were to inventory the available agricultural production resources in Utah, to determine how those resources could be allocated most efficiently, and to provide information to aid the crop and livestock producing sectors in Utah in making informed production and marketing decisions. Utah was divided into eight agricultural production and product consumption regions and the rest of the country was regionalized into product supply and market areas. Input and output coefficients, production costs, and market prices for the major Utah crop and livestock production enterprises and their products were developed . A linear program was then used to determine how resources could most profitably be allocated among regions and production enterprises. The optimal marketing pattern for agricultural commodities produced in Utah was also generated. A sensitivity analysis was utilized to ascertain the stability of the optimal production and marketing patterns