Optimal land distribution for ambiguous profit vegetable crops using multi-objective fuzzy linear programming

Abstract

Decisions in agriculture had been driven by methodical planning to increase yields to cater to the needs of overwhelming populations while also allowing farmers to prosper. Allocating land to various crops by making use of limited resources is becoming a crucial challenge for achieving higher profits. To make cropping pattern decisions, farmers traditionally rely on experience, instinct, and comparisons with their neighbors. Since profit varies depending on many factors, intuition and experience usually cannot guarantee optimal (maximum) profits. A number of research studies on linear programming (LP) have shown optimum cropping patterns when crop prices (profits) are fixed. Vegetable crops, also known as cash crops, are subject to a high degree of price volatility owing to the fact that their production is costly and they carry a significant risk of not being profitable, despite the fact that they provide higher earnings than food crops. The net returns of crops in agriculture are greatly impacted by price uncertainty. With the use of the optimization tool TORA, a step-by-step process is shown in this paper to solve the model and manage the volatility in vegetable crop profitability using fuzzy multi-objective linear programming (FMOLP).