Crop Modelling for Land Use Planning

Land use planning under multiple (and partly) conflicting development goals with increasing competition for scarce resources is complex and planners need tools such as models and expert systems to make the issues transparent and identify feasible solutions.

Strategic agricultural planning needs to identity the most relevant issues for a given region. Planners need to all avail themselves of quantitative information on optimum land use allocation under a given set of goals and constraints. A key to resolving potential conflicts between the required increase in productivity and farmers income and the conservation of water, soil and other natural resources is to identity production systems and technologies that make optimum use of external inputs and natural resources and avoid natural resources degradation and policy measures supporting their adoption for sustainable agriculture development.

Food security and sustainable agriculture development have conventionally been the focus of land use plans. Our demands for agricultural land grazing, forestry, wildlife tourism and other development activities are greater than the land resources available. The LUP goals define what is meant by the best use of the land and may be grouped under the heading of efficiency, equity and acceptability and sustainability.

The time has now come to take a hard look into the concept of multifunctional agriculture in which it has one or several functions in addition to its primary role of producing food. An ideal land use system for such a programme would be targeted for increasing the agricultural production for conservation of soils as well as improving the productivity of water in a command area watershed or for ensuring livelihood generating employment and last but not the least for ensuring food security.

Before applying a model, it is necessary to analyze each component to evaluate constraints, causes of these constraints, indicators of current sustainability and technology needed to attain the level of sustainability. This book explores essence of the land use plan for a set of conditions in administrative manageability and political problem and potentiality and political problem and potentiality of resources, availability of technology, social acceptability and responsiveness and environmental integrity.