TITLE:
Distributed versus Lumped Optimization of Cropping Pattern and Water Resources Utilization
AUTHORS:
Mohammad Mehdi Ghasemi, Mohammad Karamouz, Lee Teang Shui
KEYWORDS:
Lumped and Distributed Optimization; Cropping Pattern; Water Resources
JOURNAL NAME:
Agricultural Sciences,
Vol.5 No.4,
March
13,
2014
ABSTRACT: Several whole-farm agro-economic optimization models
have been developed to deal with lumped planning issues in the
agriculture sector. However, these models cannot be used to devise appropriate
management strategies at land parcel level, because of the differences between
farm characteristics, and the increased complexity of the hydrological
processes. Based on Spatial Farm Database (SFD) which is consisted of a number
of farm-level spatial data, including location, paddock properties, owner
specifications and budgets, it is possible to provide the farm manager with
some suggestions regarding the optimal choice of crops and the area to be
allocated for each one. To this end, genetic algorithm is used in order to cope
with model nonlinearity and a large number of decision variables. In order to test
the proposed model, the Mobarakabad district is modeled with 126 agriculture
fields, and the optimization model is run for this area. Results showed that
the optimization procedure can find more realistic farm-level optimal solutions
due to its advantage in adequate modeling of field characteristics, common
groundwater resources, and the associated constraints. The results of lumped optimizations could also
be used as benchmarks for the purposes of comparison and interpretation.