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As far as crop acreage choices are concerned, a consensus seems to exist among agricultural scientistsand extension agents: crop rotation effects and the related constraints are major determinants offarmers’ crop choices. Crop rotation effects are inherently dynamic. They are generally ignored inmulticrop models with land as an allocable input found in the literature since most of these models aredeveloped within a static framework.The aim of this paper is twofold (i) to propose a new approach and tools for investigating dynamic cropacreage choices accounting for crop rotation benefits and constraints and (ii) to illustrate the impacts ofcrop rotation effects and constraints on farmers’ acreage choices through simulation examples. Themodels proposed in this paper are sufficiently simple for being empirically tractable either insimulation studies or in econometric and mathematical programming analyses.Our simulation results tend to show responses of the optimal dynamic acreages to simple price shockswhich are much more complex than those implied by static models. They also demonstrate thatfarmers’ perceptions of the future economic context are crucial determinants of their acreage choices.In fact current acreage choices may appear suboptimal in a static sense but are fully consistent whendynamic effects of crop rotations are specified.
