In many areas of South Africa traditional valve replacement subsistence farming practices entail overstocking of cattle.The resulting damage to the veld can be arrested only by providing the farmers with economic incentives to reduce stocking densities.In this paper cattle offtake strategies are investigated with a view to maximising revenue at lower stocking densities.
This is achieved by developing a mathematical model which Pennants predicts the revenue generated by a given strategy.It is shown that although the model is nonlinear, a transformation can be made to enable optimisation by linear programming.