The role of deficit irrigation in compromising environmental - economical goals of cropping pattern in Fars Province

The purpose of this research is the role of deficit irrigation in compromising environmental – economical goals of cropping pattern in Fars Province.
This technique is considered as a strategy to increase profitability. However, in addition to profitability goal, many studies have focused to optimize water and fertilizers consumption as environmental objectives. Current study investigates the rule of deficit irrigation in a model that compromises the economic and environmental objectives. Fasa city in Fars province were selected as the study area since placed in warm climate field and affected by water stress. A Fuzzy nonlinear programming model were used to compromise the goals of maximum gross margin and minimum chemical fertilizer and water consumption for a representative farm in study area. This model was subjected to yield response functions to water and other constraints.
Findings: The results showed that the representative farm is inefficient to select cropping pattern in comparison to compromised goals model. This comparison also revealed there is a the possibility for increasing income of representative farm by applying full irrigation to gain potential yield and reducing cultivation area for considering the available water restrictions.
Discussion and Although, increasing of gross margin is conflicted by decreasing water consumption and partly by reducing fertilizer use, but generalizing the results of representative farm to the whole city showed that implementation of this model will add the revenues about 94 billion Rials in total area. While the positive environmental outcomes such as reducing about 4.6 million cubic meters of water and 7,246 tons of chemical fertilizer would be the other results of implementing this model.