Title : A model-based optimization framework for multi-year allocation of land and water
Abstract:
Due to increasing food demand and water scarcity, the planning and management of agricultural land is one of the major challenges the world is currently facing. In my talk I will discuss how Crop Growth Models can be used for multi-year planning of land and irrigation water allocation. I will start with a brief overview of Crop Growth Models and outline how they can be used to estimate crop Water Productivity Functions that are both location and climate dependent. I will then describe in details how this information can be used to formulate the land and water allocation problem as an optimization problem that can be solved using well-established optimization algorithms. I will discuss how the proposed framework compares to existing approaches, and in particular: (1) the proposed framework does not produce a single “optimal” plan but rather provides the user with a list of “good” plans from which the user can chose his/her preferred plan taking into account factors that were not included in the original analysis (such as for instance year-to-year fluctuations of profit or water use); (2) the proposed framework takes into account the need to rotate crops according to specific agronomic patterns, which ensures that the recommended multi-year plan is indeed acceptable from an agronomic stand-point. I will conclude my presentation by outlining various extensions that could be readily added to this framework, such as taking into account the impact of climate change or including a feedback mechanism whereby crop market value is affected by production.
