Introduction: Activity in the agricultural sector is accompanied by risk and uncertainty due to natural hazards, price fluctuations in the market, and the behavior of farmers themselves, which causes farmers to face risks and uncertainty about future income in the decision-making process for input consumption and production. This shows the importance of paying attention to risk in agricultural planning. On the other hand, in many countries, including Iran, water shortage is one of the main challenges for the government. Especially, since in Iran, about 90 percent of water resources are consumed in the agricultural sector, water shortages and droughts have caused the country suffering from water shortages to face problems and crises. The importance of this issue has led researchers to pay great attention to this issue. The adaptation strategies that farmers use when dealing with drought are defined in two parts: risk and crisis management. To deal with this phenomenon and reduce damage, farmers are required to adopt appropriate strategies. Today, changing farmers’ cultivation patterns and using water resources and plant diversity at different levels in pastures are among the basic strategies that most experts emphasize to deal with the drought. Given that the selected cultivation pattern of farmers is affected by their degree of risk aversion; therefore, when faced with conditions such as the water shortage, in order to use water optimally, a cultivation pattern appropriate to their risk aversion should be propose to facilitate its adoption. Therefore, in this study, using a Quadratic Risk Programming (QRP) model, optimal cultivation patterns based on the degree of risk aversion of farmers were determined for agricultural lands in Nazarabad County of Iran under water access restrictions in water shortage conditions.
Materials and Method: There are various methods for decision-making and development of cropping patterns under risk conditions, one of which is QRP model. This model deals with maximizing expected returns and minimizing risk. In the present study, the objective function of the used model was minimizing the risk of profit. The constraints of the model included achieving the expected profit and constraints on water, land, and capital inputs. It should be noted that to calculate the expected profit, a model was first solved with the aim of maximizing profit with respect to input constraints, and the maximum profit obtained from it was multiplied by a factor of 0.95, 0.9, and 0.85. This means that farmers were considered who were willing to give up 5, 10 and 15 percent of the maximum achievable profit, respectively, but followed a low-risk cropping pattern. The farmer who gives up 15 percent of his gross profit to reduce risk is more risk-averse than the other two groups of farmers. The studied products included major cultivated irrigated crops such as wheat, barley, rapeseed, cucumber, tomato, potato, and onion. The required data included the amount of water consumption per hectare, the capital required per hectare, the current cultivation levels, the price of the products, and the yield of the products which were collected by referring to the Agriculture-Jahad Center of the studied region and also the website of the Ministry of Agriculture-Jahad (MAJ) for the 2021-2022 cropping year. Finally, the results were estimated using GAMS software.
Results and Discussion: Based on the results, with a 5 percent reduction in water availability and the presence of farmers with low risk aversion, it was suggested that barley cultivation would be reduced by 42 percent compared to the current cropping pattern; but in contrast, the cultivation of wheat, cucumber, potato, and rapeseed should be increased; for example, the area of ​​potato cultivation should be changed from 5 hectares to 50 hectares and the area of ​​cucumber cultivation should be changed from 8 hectares to 111 hectares. In the proposed cultivation pattern, the share of rapeseed and wheat cultivations also increased by about 1 and 21 percent, respectively. Also, under conditions of a 10 percent reduction in water availability, increased risk aversion led to a decrease in the share of wheat cultivation and an increase in the area of ​​barley and rapeseed cultivations. On the other hand, under higher risk aversion, a greater decrease in water availability led to a decrease in the share of cucumber and wheat cultivations, and in contrast, the share of barley cultivation increased. The study results showed that the reduction in water availability, along with the level of risk aversion of farmers, had an effect on the total land used, so that with a 5 percent reduction in water availability, in conditions of low risk aversion, the total amount of land used decreased by about 8 percent compared to the current cultivation pattern, while in higher risk aversions, the total cultivation area faced little change. In other words, cropping pattern management for farmers with a high degree of risk aversion caused the total amount of cultivated land to not change much even in conditions of further reduction in water availability. Along with the change in cropping pattern, the amount of profit and risk of the cropping pattern also changed. However, in the scenarios studied, the percentage of risk reduction was always greater than the percentage of profit reduction.
Conclusion and Suggestions: Based on the results in different risk aversion scenarios, the proposed cropping pattern changed compared to the current cropping pattern in such a way that with increasing drought and consequently, decreasing water availability, in order to reduce risk, it is necessary for farmer with higher risk aversion to reduce the level of cucumber cultivation, and conversely, the level of cultivation of crops such as rapeseed should be increased. Also, based on the study results, although reducing water availability saves water consumption, it also reduces farmers’ profits. Therefore, in order to encourage farmers to implement the proposed cultivation patterns and compensate for the reduction in their profits, it is suggested that solutions such as providing a suitable market for selling products, purchasing at a guaranteed price, and providing facilities to farmers be considered.