Optimization model to support sustainable crop planning for reducing unfairness among farmers

Abstract

Inherent uncertainty surrounding the agri-food sector negatively impacts the supply chain's (SC) sustainability and performance. A main consequence of this uncertainty is the imbalance between supply and demand with volatility in prices and high quantities of waste and unmet demand. Usually, farmers are the most affected by the negative impact of uncertainty. To improve their competitive position, it is necessary to implement new business models that encourage the collaboration among farms, try to reduce the number of intermediaries between farms and markets, reduce the activities related to the management of perishable crops and their associated costs, and enable mechanisms to sell the oversupply of crops such as their settlement. In this paper, a novel multi-objective model is proposed to support the crop planning under uncertainty for the proposed business model. Three objectives aligned with the triple bottom lines are considered: SC profit maximization (economic), waste minimization (environmental) and unfairness minimization (social). The last objective reduces the unwillingness of farms to cooperate with the crop planning. The model is solved with the weighted sum method and compared to an equivalent model considering only economic objectives, concluding that environmental and social aspects can be highly improved by little decreasing profits.

Crop cultivation planning with fuzzy estimation using water wave optimization

“…Loṕez-Mata et al (2016) developed a direct-solution algorithm capable of determining the crop ´planning (area and volume of water per crop) that maximizes the profitability of an irrigation farm based on the data including the total cultivable area of the farm, the amount of available irrigation water, and the "gross margin vs. irrigation depth" functions of the considered crops. Esteso et al (2022) presented a centralized multi-objective mathematical programming model to support the sustainable crop planning definition for a region that jointly optimize three objectives including supply chain profits maximization, waste minimization, and unfairness among farmers minimization; the multi-objective model was solved by applying the weighted sum method.…”

Multi-fractional fuzzy programming for sustainable agricultural multi-cropping bi-seasonal planning

“…Comparing to the based-year of the study area, they concluded that 1% increase in urbanization would reduce water consumption in agriculture by 0.639mm 3 . [20] integrates three objectives related to economic, social and environmental aspects, and proposed a multiple objective model to improve agri-food production with minimum food waste through sustaianble agri-food supply chain considering fermers cropping decision. [21] studied the aspect of inbalance between demand and supply of the crop planning problems in agricultural sector under uncertain environment, and applied the concept to fresh tomato Argentinean supply chain.…”

Collaborative Plan to Reduce Inequalities Among the Farms Through Optimization

“…Once harvested, vegetables can be stored at farm, transported to cooperative, or wasted (7). Vegetables can be stored until their remaining shelf life gets lower than the required by consumers (8).…”

“…Proof of this is the large number of models to support the crop planning in the literature (e.g. [4][5][6][7]). However, most of these models propose centralized approaches in which one single user makes decisions for the entire supply chain (SC).…”