Simulation of impacts of irrigated agriculture on income, employment and environment

This paper uses a multicriteria mathematical programming model to estimate the farmer's utility function and simulate different scenarios and policies as well as to make alternative production plans. Application of this model was carried out in the irrigated region of the Xanthi Prefecture in Greece, as well as to three different farm clusters. The three farm clusters -small, medium and large sizes- were the result of a cluster analysis into a sample of farms of the region. In all these four cases, we considered three criteria for the estimation of the utility function; the maximization of total gross margin, the minimization of its variance and the minimization of labor. The estimated utility functions were used as objective functions of Linear or Quadratic (when the variance is considered) Programming models in order to find the optimum production plan of the total region and each farm size separately. These models were used to simulate the impacts on the production plan, income, employment and the environment due to a policy, which increases the price of irrigation water.