Regarding the rapid socio-economic development, increasing food demand and decreasing available resources, this challenge has become a major problem in the agricultural sector, causing the change consumption from surface water to groundwater resources and reduction of farmers' income. Therefore, optimal programming of the cropping pattern is necessary to handle such challenges. To accomplish the mentioned aim, a model of irrigation water allocation was developed based on the cropping pattern using multistage stochastic programming in accordance with the surface water supply fluctuations. In this model, different stochastic states are considered for all irrigation seasons in the irrigation network of Jiroft plain in Kerman province, which faces a severe shortage of surface water resources and the tendency of farmers to overuse groundwater resources. By solving multistage stochastic model, it can be observed that by utilizing an appropriate programming of the cropping pattern, more benefits for the farmers could be realized in the conditions of available surface water fluctuations. The results also indicated that if the surface water released into the canals increased in the spring, the share of profitable with high water consumption crops in pattern will increase, which will strengthen farmers' profits and pressure on groundwater resources. However, it could not expect to receive a significant reduction of groundwater resource consumption and a significant increase of cropping intensity. According to the results obtained, surface water resources cannot meet the water needs of the region, even by using optimal cropping patterns, and this has led to overuse of groundwater resources in this area. Finally, such planning can help adoption of desired policies for irrigation water management through the proper release of these resources.
Accomplishing the objectives of optimal and sustainable management in the agricultural sector is increasingly getting complicated, which includes increasing the sustainable productivity of water and energy resources, ensuring food security, decreasing contaminations from fertilizers and chemical pesticides, and environmental destruction. The present research deals with designing the relationships between the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus approach with economic and environmental objectives to accomplish the aforementioned objectives. Hence, a multi-objective programming model was developed to maximize the water-energy-food nexus index and farmers' gross margin, minimize the use of chemical fertilizers (nitrogen and phosphate), and minimize the use of chemical pesticides (herbicides) by considering the balancing constraint to groundwater resources. Afterward, the proposed multi-objective model was solved using the augmented ε-constraint method, and then the total of strong and efficient Pareto solutions was extracted. Then, the best solution was chosen using the TOPSIS method and assigning a weight of equal importance to the desired objectives. The irrigation network of Jiroft plain in Kerman province in Iran was chosen as the study area to implement such a system. The obtained results indicated that the optimal and sustainable management in the agriculture sector can be hopeful using the proposed approach in the current research. On the other hand, the results revealed that despite considering the economic objective in the proposed system, the farmers' profits can be significantly decreased. Thus, the realization of optimal and sustainable management in the agricultural sector is not possible without the implementation of policies for increasing the economic incentive of farmers.
Today, growing the production of the agricultural sector in order to meet the increasing demand of food is happening through excessive consumption of water resources, energy, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, especially in developing countries. Therefore, the present study aims to design a new approach for sustainable management of resources and realization of clean production in the agricultural sector. In order to design the new approach of the present study, the integration of two concepts of water-energy-food (WEF) nexus and decoupling pollution- agricultural growth (DEC) was used. The proposed approach is modeled through the multi-objective programming model by optimizing the WEF and DEC indices, which is the first research effort in this field. In this regard, the performance of this approach was evaluated in Jiroft county in Kerman province, Iran. The results of the study showed that the consumption of chemical fertilizers and pesticides in the optimal pattern with the simultaneous provision of WEF and gross margin (GM) goals (Optimal 1) is about 110 kg and 0.19 liters per hectare, respectively, more than the proposed pattern (Optimal 3). On the other hand, the consumption of water and energy resources in the optimal pattern with the simultaneous provision of DEC and GM goals (Optimal 2) is about 8785 cubic meters and 1108 MJ per hectare more than the proposed pattern (Optimal 3), respectively. Therefore, this approach, due to the simultaneous integration of two concepts of sustainable development in the agricultural sector, can overcome the weakness of the WEF nexus in not paying attention to the issues of environmental pollution affected by the use of chemical inputs and the weakness of separating pollution- agricultural growth in not paying attention to the management of water and energy resources in the agricultural sector.
The current research aims to identify the components of tourism and ecotourism activities in rural women's entrepreneurship based on the experts' point of view. In terms of the purpose, it was conducted as survey research. The current research is a descriptive and analytical study. According to the statistics obtained from the cultural heritage organization and the governorate of Kerman province in 2019, 370 are active in the field of tourism, and of these statistics, 219 women are active in the field of tourism and ecotourism, which was estimated to be 139 according to the Cochran formula. First, by reviewing the research literature, based on the opinion of experts, 32 factors have been extracted as the final factors of tourism and ecotourism on rural women entrepreneurs, which is the research tool of the questionnaire. The findings of the research showed that there is a significant relationship between the expansion of rural tourism and ecotourism in these villages and the entrepreneurship of rural women in the dimensions of knowledge and awareness, management capabilities, environmental and economic factors, advertising and psychological factors at the alpha level of 0.05 percent. There is no significant relationship between social norms and rural women's entrepreneurship. According to the results obtained from the factor analysis model and obtaining the points or factor load of each of the indicators, 6 interrelated indicators have an effect on the first effective factor on tourism entrepreneurship. Cultural factors such as "gender norms" are the most important factors
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.