Water Resources Sustainability and Optimal Cropping Pattern in Farming Systems; A Multi-Objective Fractional Goal Programming Approach

Water resources sustainability has the main contribution to the existence and durability of the farming systems and strongly depends on the cropping pattern practices. A comprehensive cropping pattern planning takes in to account the high level of interrelation of the environmental, economic and social aspects of farming systems. In order to assess the sustainability of water resources and determine an optimal pattern of cropping in a rural farming system, this paper introduces two ratios of “net return/water consumption” and “labor employment/water consumption” and attempts to simultaneously optimize them as the sustainability indicators. To this purpose, a multi-objective fractional goal programming (MOFGP) procedure is considered as the main approach of the study to be accomplished by several other single and multi-objective linear and fractional programming models. The results show that the FP models are more significant to contribute in assessing the sustainability indicators compared to the LP models, and the MOFGP solution is considered better, compared to the single objective FP solutions. The results will be illustrated quantitatively. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010