Trade-off between water pollution prevention, agriculture profit, and farmer practice—an optimization methodology for discussion on land-use adjustment in China

Abstract

Agricultural decision-making to control nonpoint source (NPS) water pollution may not be efficiently implemented, if there is no appropriate cost-benefit analysis on agricultural management practices. This paper presents an interval-fuzzy linear programming (IFLP) model to deal with the trade-off between agricultural revenue, NPS pollution control, and alternative practices through land adjustment for Wuchuan catchment, a typical agricultural area in Jiulong River watershed, Fujian Province of China. From the results, the lower combination of practice 1, practice 2, practice 3, and practice 7 with the land area of 12.6, 5.2, 145.2, and 85.3 hm 2 , respectively, could reduce NPS pollution load by 10 %. The combination yields an income of 98,580 Chinese Yuan/a. If the pollution reduction is 15 %, the higher combination need practice 1, practice 2, practice 3, practice 5, and practice 7 with the land area of 54.4, 23.6, 18.0, 6.3, and 85.3 hm 2 , respectively. The income of this combination is 915,170 Chinese Yuan/a. The sensitivity analysis of IFLP indicates that the cost-effective practices are ranked as follows: practice 7 > practice 2 > practice 1 > practice 5 > practice 3 > practice 6 > practice 4. In addition, the uncertainties in the agriculture NPS pollution control system could be effectively quantified by the IFLP model. Furthermore, to accomplish a reasonable and applicable project of land-use adjustment, decisionmakers could also integrate above solutions with their own experience and other information.

Economic and Environmental Impacts of Cropping Pattern Elements Using Systems Dynamics

“…Since both groundwater level and farmers' income are affected by cropping pattern, defining an appropriate cropping pattern is an imperative issue that should be noted [1][2][3][4]. Consequently, both decreasing groundwater depletion and increasing the farmers' income are essential considerations [4][5][6][7]. Cropping pattern could be impacted by many factors such as policy change, importing and exporting rules of agricultural products, climate, product demands, water supply, job opportunities and so on.…”

“…During recent years, a large number of studies, many of which are based on cropping pattern optimization, have been done [2,5,6,[8][9][10][11][12]. Fazlali et al [13] used a coupled simulation-optimization model to determine the optimal cropping pattern in the Arayez plain in the Karkheh river basin in Iran.…”

Uncertainty analysis for an effluent trading system in a typical nonpoint-sources-polluted watershed

“…(3) . Generally, the stochastic variable ( ε ) can be obtained from the long-term statistics of monitoring reports or case-by-case examination 11 . Because of imperfect knowledge, the value of ε was assumed to be 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, 1.0 and 1.1 in this research, depending in part on the reliability of the SWAT model.…”

“…However, this is not the case for those typical NPS-polluted rivers, in which the WAC changes significantly over time owing to the variation of flow and the physical–chemical–biological processes that occur within the river system 10 . Third, abatement efforts for NPSs are often simulated mathematically 11 12 . However, the effectiveness of BMPs is also uncertain owing to imperfect knowledge and limited experience 13 .…”

Optimal Cultivation Pattern to Increase Revenue and Reduce Water Use: Application of Linear Programming to Arjan Plain in Fars Province

“…The most common technique used for cropping pattern optimization (CPO) is linear programming (LP). Efficient optimization methods for crop area planning are desired and beneficial to agricultural water management as they can decide how much water should be allocated to different cropped areas in order to obtain certain goals, such as maximizing benefit and minimizing water-use of an irrigation system [11][12][13][14].…”