Developing optimal sustainable farming with emphasis on limited water resources (Case Study: Kuzaran County of Kermanshah Province)

One of the most important goals of agricultural managers and planners is optimizing the use of resources and inputs and designing suitable cropping patterns. This study aims at determining the optimal cropping pattern in Kuzaran city of Kermanshah province using conventional linear programming model, the definitive goal programming and fuzzy goal programming, in order to achieve the five objectives of maximizing efficiency of the program, minimizing cash investment costs, minimizing water consumption, minimizing the use of chemical fertilizers and minimizing the use of chemical pesticides with emphasis on the limited water resources in agriculture. For this purpose, a generic model was examined for Kuzaran county using data on crop production costs in Kermanshah Province in 2012-2013 crop year. The results indicated that using fuzzy goal programming model provided better results compared to other models, because it made it possible to achieve all the five goals simultaneously and making the model fuzzy increased its flexibility. In a way that the gross margin in this pattern increased 5 percent more than its current state and cash investment costs, water consumption, use of chemical fertilizers and chemical pesticides decreased 12.27, 5.29, 12.92 and 5 percent in 2013-2014 crop year respectively. Also implementing the proposed cropping pattern in addition to reaching the five goals, prevents wasting 5267160 cubic meters of water with minimal changes to the current pattern of cultivating.