Abstract
The global agriculture sector faces many challenges in its mission to meet the increasing demand for food and fiber. Climate change, increasing population growth, emergence of crop diseases, damage to crops from rodents and critters, and shrinking farming land in some regions are among these challenges. Application of agrochemicals has proven to be an efficient answer to some of these challenges. However, the impacts of these products on human health and the environment combined with the increased requirement for sustainable farming requires the development of optimal spraying practices that would balance out all interests and concerns. In this paper, a mathematical model is developed to jointly minimize spraying time and drift losses. The obtained bi-objective mixed integer nonlinear programming model is solved for a case study example published in the crop protection literature. Optimal solutions are obtained using the weighted sum method and the epsilon-constraint approach. The results showed that valid and reasonable solutions can be obtained by selecting the appropriate combination of boom height, nozzle spacing, nozzle type, and tractor travel speed. Useful insights are obtained through various computational experiments.
Highlights
Sustainable agriculture aims at placing the agricultural inputs in such way to reduce the environmental degradation along with optimizing the operational efficiency and reduce the cost of operation
The boom height will be raised from the optimal value to the nearest operationally viable height
It should be noted that any nozzle type other than F110 02 would work because drift reduction has a weight of 0
Summary
Sustainable agriculture aims at placing the agricultural inputs in such way to reduce the environmental degradation along with optimizing the operational efficiency and reduce the cost of operation. Agrochemicals can save 45% of the world food supply by protecting crops from different insects and pests [5] On other hand, this heavy use of agrochemicals has increased the risk of air, soil, and water pollution. Almost 30% of agricultural chemicals are wasted due to off-target spray drift [7,8] This off-target spray drift could create health issues for animals and humans, damage nearby sensitive crops, and contaminate water sources and soils. In the modern agriculture world, timely execution of farming operations is required to ensure the efficiency of the activities by reducing activity durations, energy (fuel) use, labour hired, and overall cost (which is one pillar of sustainable agriculture) [10]
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