What to do when resources are limiting

Management decisions in farming systems often relate to applying the resources available to the tasks needed. It is unusual that a farm will have all the resources it needs, but more likely that we will be deciding what to do when resources are limiting. For example, what do we do if there isn't enough money to buy seed, or there is insufficient labour to milk cows, or there's not enough land for the crops needed? CLEM is designed to predict the system and economic outcomes of such scenarios. The resulting action of these shortfalls can be defined by the user for every activity. There are three options available to handle resource shortfalls.

This option will report an error and stop the simulation. This is designed for situations where you do not want this activity to have any shortfall of resources. You can view the error messages in the messages tab of the CLEM component or at the bottom of the Summary file and adjust your settings before running the simulation again. This is the default value for this setting when you create a new activity.

With this option the activity is simply skipped when insufficient resources are available. It may be that you only perform this activity in good times when resources are available or it is an "all or nothing" type of activity. You are able to determine when activities have been skipped by viewing the Activities performed report and identifying the green tick when the activity was successfully performed.

This option allows the activity to proceed and use the resources available. It is up to the code behind the activity to determine what to do in this situation. For example, if only 20 kg of feed was available to feed cattle needing 100 kg, the feed activity will take the 20 kg and feed it to the animals who would in turn have reduced growth if no additional feeding activity was provided. You will find descriptions of what an activity does in this situations in the description of each activity.

This option uses the same approach as Use available resources but also indicates that any shortfall should influence the outcome of the activity if the functionality is supported by the activity. Activities will support this to varying degrees with most working only with the resources provided (e.g. only feeding ruminants the feed available at the time of feeding when less than required). Other activities will also allow any shortfall in associated fees or labour to proportionally reduce the activity task and this is where this option will ensure these limitations are considered.

See also

See next section - Allowing random variability in your simulation