Impact of Optimal Cropping Patterns on Incomes in a Punjab District

To improve farm incomes in developing countries, the foremost question that the farmer must address himself to is: what cropping pattern best uses the fixed resources in order to get the highest returns? During the last decade, the agricultural economists have shown great interest in applying the tools of linear programming to individual farms. Most of the studies conducted elsewhere have shown that, under existing cropping pattern, farm resources were not being utilized optimally on the small farms.[l, 4]. We conducted a survey in the canal-irrigated areas of the Punjab province of Pakistan1 to investigate into the same problem. This short note aims at identifying the optimal cropping pattern and to estimate the increase in farm incomes as a result of a switch towards it on the sampled farms.