An integrated strategic framework for large-scale crop planning: sustainable climate-smart crop planning and agri-food supply chain management

• Published in: Sustainable production and consumption 2021-04, Vol.26, p.709-732
• Main Authors: Hajimirzajan, Amir, Vahdat, Mohammadali, Sadegheih, Ahmad, Shadkam, Elham, Bilali, Hamid El
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Agri-food supply chain; climate diversity; cropping plan; irrigation productivity; large-scale modeling; natural resources allocation
• ISSN: 2352-5509; 2352-5509
• DOI: 10.1016/j.spc.2020.12.016

Today, the benefits of climate diversity and scaling up farmers' coordination to the landscape are particularly crucial in meeting increasing food demand and planning crop cultivation. The growing population with changing dietary patterns creates a higher demand for sustainable, coordinated agri-food networks, which consolidated the value chain of the agri-foods at both the farmers and the market side. In this paper, a strategic planning framework from a large-scale crop supply chain perspective is presented for National crop Growers’ Associations (NGAs). The proposed framework aims to better equip crop growers, in a complex decision situation in taking advantage of complementary climate and market opportunities, to plan: what, when, and how to produce crops by using water-sustainable cropping plans. The coverage of this framework is at the national level to be able to take advantage of climate diversity and complementary markets in provinces with various climatic conditions. Using a multi-stage model on a countrywide management level and crop evapotranspiration and water requirement estimates, during crop growth in the different geographical and climatic ranges, it provides advisedly estimation for the regional (counties) quantity of optimum cultivation, storage, and transportation at the minimum cost and optimum land and water usage as a reform plan for optimizing existing harvesting practices. Moreover, assurance of total local farmers' income, re-cultivation in the planning horizon, and perishability of crops are considered. These considerations allow the proposed comprehensive framework to support the successful high yield practices and more water productivity in susceptible regions and months by using the regional climatic advantages, including crop evapotranspiration, effective precipitation, and irrigation productivity. In order to illustrate the application of the framework, it was applied to 429 counties and 30 provinces of Iran for potato, onion, and tomato farming systems in 2020. Computational results guarantee small-scale farmers' income, stabilize food demand coverage, and save 397 million m3 of irrigation water yearly.