Digitizing farmers' land use decisions - interactive whole farm optimization

Smart and informed farm management and policy decisions are a key prerequisite for improving livelihoods of smallholder farmers worldwide. Climatic changes, volatile prices, policy shifts and technology innovations are some of the decision factors hinting at the complexity of challenges faced. Whole-farm mathematical programming has a long tradition in farm operations and agricultural economics research helping to understand and analyze complex implications of management decisions considering the full farm-household system. However, a technical and conceptual knowledge divide has prevented its widespread use in direct interaction with smallholder farmers so far, both in farm management and agricultural policy analysis. Although rapid progress in Information and Communication Technologies has made digital management tools accessible on mobile devices such as smartphones, software solutions for smallholder farmers that go beyond addressing isolated tasks (such as recommending on fertilizer or pesticide applications) and take a systematic whole-farm planning approach are not yet available. Here we present a farm simulator, which is an extension of the well established agent-based software package MPMAS with a lightweight graphical interface based on the R Shiny package. We applied the farm planning tool in a participatory mathematical programming approach analyzing the opportunities and barriers to adoption of new agroforestry options for smallholder farmers in Paraguay. While the tool proved very successful in the policy analysis context, evaluating its application for acceptance by smallholders and other stakeholders also revealed important insights for the future development of smart and mobile farm management solutions.