Optimization of cropping pattern at Khorramdarreh Agro-industrial Complex

Nowadays, agro-industrial complexes play an important role in food security, especially in developing countries, due to their advantages such as facilitating planning, increasing food production, reducing consumer costs, encouraging innovation and technological development, creating job opportunities, and enhancing food availability. The current study was performed to develop a cultivation program that would minimize water consumption and maximize income at Khorramdareh agro-industrial complex covering an area of 1262 ha in Zanjan Province. The ordinary least squares method (POLS) due to Peykani (سال انتشار؟) was used in Lingo v.18 to analyze the economic data sets (the 2100-2020 time series) on irrigated crops including wheat, barley, corn, canola, and alfalfa at the complex under study. The results indicated an increase of 118.18% in the area under barley cultivation. In contrast, the areas under wheat, canola, maize, and alfalfa cultivations decreased by 33.33%, 73.19%, 34.79%, and 20.44%, respectively. It was also found that the optimized cropping pattern developed for the complex would decrease the total cultivated area (by 25.87%), water consumption (25.32%), machine working hours (25.70%), labor (25.87%), as well as fertilizer (30.50%) and pesticide (39.45%) consumptions compared to those measured for the current cropping pattern although the current net income would remain almost invariable (showing an increase of only +0.09%) while no crop would be removed from the current pattern. It was, therefore, concluded that the estimations seemed realistic.