Short-term decisions and the impact of current business position on future decisions

To make AFO more useful for individual farm optimisation and short term decision making the multi-period framework was developed. The multi-period version of AFO represents the starting position of an actual farm and optimises its management over the following years. The final year of the sequence is treated as a single year equilibrium to ensure that selling all the assets in the final year is not the optimum solution. The MP framework is a repurposed version of the season sequence mode.

The multi-period framework allows users to examine short term decisions such as not mating a class of stock for a single year or how best to respond to short-term price fluctuations. It also allows users to identify the optimal transition from a farms current structure to the optimum. For example, if the current farm had 1500 stock but the optimum is to have 5000, the MP model will identify the most efficient way to build stock numbers and over how many years it should be done.