Real-Life Decision Making -- Solution
Plant one variety of peach tree
You are a farmer and you sell your produce at a fruit stand. You have just
bought some new land and you want to use it for peach trees. You have been
researching the varieties of peach trees and when their fruit becomes ready
for harvest.
You have decided to plant only one variety of peach. Since peaches need
to be spot-picked, you don't want to spend three months visiting your trees
daily. You choose a variety that will become ripe in mid-July.
In mid-July, most of your peaches are ripe. You harvest every morning,
spot-picking the ripe fruit and leaving the unripe ones for a later day. You
are able to bring quite a few boxes of peaches into your fruit stand daily.
You realize that you have more peaches than you are able to sell at the
fruit stand in July. You are worried the fruit will be wasted. You try to
sell some of the excess to a fruit wholesaler, but they don't deal with such
small producers. You've got too much for your fruit stand, but not enough
to wholesale it.
By September, your peaches are finished and you get some requests for them
at your fruit stand. You are unable to satisfy this demand from your customers.
Gina Harfman is a farmer with a small orchard and some ground
crops. She sells her peaches at her family's fruit stand. "I ordered my [different]
peach trees with the purpose to have the right varieties to spread out the
harvest," she says.