Real-Life Decision Making
You just bought some land and you're going to expand your farm. You have
a small family farm and a fruit stand for sales. You have noticed that your
customers have been asking for peaches. You want to plant peach trees on your
new land to meet this demand.
There are many varieties of peaches to choose from. The different varieties
produce fruit at different times in the season. For harvesting purposes, it
would be more convenient to have all the fruit ripen at the same time.
Peaches ripen at different times, even on the same tree. Multiple visits
to the same tree to pick the ripe fruit (spot-picking) are necessary. This
makes peaches labor-intensive to harvest.
If you only had one variety of peach tree, it would cut down on the time
you spent spot-picking. The downside is that most of the fruit would ripen
at the same time, but you would still have to spot-pick it out among those
peaches that weren't yet quite ready. However, as a fruit stand owner, you
want to be able to have fresh fruit available for your customers throughout
the season.
If you planted different varieties of peaches that ripen from mid-July
to mid-September, you would be able to harvest a few boxes of peaches every
day from July to October. But having to spot-pick peaches every day for months
would be a big time commitment and might keep you from other work on your
farm.
Gina Harfman is a farmer with a small orchard and some ground crops. She
recently bought some farm land and had to decide what to plant. She spent
some time considering varieties of peaches. The harvest time was a big part
of her decision.
What do you do?