Olympe is a decision helper tool and a technical and economical simulator.
Olympe is conceived as a decision-, or more appropriately reflection-, support tool to improve farmer's or groups of farmers’ understanding of their own situation and their socio-economic context. Olympe can be used in a variety of situations and with different methodological approaches: comparison of cropping systems, economics of farming systems and resources management, prospective analysis, regional analysis, and even in association with simulation game.
Olympe is a decision helper tool for researchers seeking the technical changes in a farm or for a group of farms in a region.
Olympe allows simulating possible evolution of farms according to their choices of activities and their allocation of production factors over a ten years period or more. Olympe provides forecasts on economic results, cash flows, and manpower requirements. It can thus be used to assess the sustainability of production and farming systems. Olympe also permits to test robustness of systems against variability of climate or macro-economic conditions (prices, markets). For example, Olympe have been applied to organic and traditional cocoa farming systems in Togo, assessing their sensitivity to prices and the impact of climate changes on their productivity. It has been used to analyse the evolution of irrigation systems in Tunisia under the liberalization of agricultural markets and introduction of new water pricing system.
Olympe is not an optimization model insofar as it does not calculate the optimal combination of activities for a farm or a scheme, but it allows the evaluation of impacts of scenarios imagined by farmers with the help of the researchers. If relevant, Olympe can be associated with an optimization model (data stored in the Olympe database can be used as inputs in the optimization model and the optimal solution can be introduced in Olympe as a scenario). Olympe can also be integrated with other kinds of models: geographic information system, agronomic model, multi-agent modelling.
Olympe is composed of a database on farming systems and a simulation tool. The database, which allows storing data collected through surveys and secondary data, is structured into several modules based on general concepts of farming systems:
Once the model is calibrated it can be used to test various scenarios of evolution. Scenarios are defined through discussions with farmers and other stakeholders. They can concern:
Olympe is currently used by various extension service organisms, research and education institutes, in France and abroad. It is translated in French, English, Spanish Dutch and Portuguese.
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