Integrated assessment of novel two-season production systems in Mato Grosso, Brazil

Session B2: Advances in Agricultural Modelling

One of the most significant advantages of growing crops in Mato Grosso (in mid-western Brazil) is that farmers can grow two crops (in some specific cases even three) in the same season. From an economic point of view, on the one hand, this provides a strong comparative advantage. On the other hand, this increases the number of decision variables that a decision making agent has to take into account. The agricultural production planning is complex and dynamic and it needs to consider crop rotation/succession in accordance with annual variability of climatic conditions. We developed a region-specific bio-economic micro-simulation model in order to assess the trade-offs between soybean, maize and cotton production in that region. The model explicitly accounts for a combination of several variables, such as crop rotation (against season and year), planting dates, fertilizer amount, crop varieties, soybean maturity groups, climatic conditions, and prices. We implemented our simulation in MPMAS, a multi-agent software package developed for simulating farm-based economic behavior and human-environment interactions in agriculture. The crop yields were simulated with the Model of Nitrogen and Carbon dynamics in Agro-ecosystems (MONICA). The simulation captured the inter-regional differences between farm holdings, which is one of the key factors in order to assess the land use change between those seasons. The simulation results show that the introduction of soybean varieties of maturity group VII improved farmer flexibility, allowing a greater number of crop rotation possibilities. It exhibits an interchanging effect on maize and cotton cultivation, as both crops compete for area during the second season, changing the production system set-up in that region.