Planning for the optimal use of productive resources in agricultural systems leads to the conservation in addition to the promotion of farmers' socio-economical conditions. Being certain or precise in any decision making in agricultural planning is impossible. Fuzzy mathematical programming techniques, developed in recent decades, are the most appropriate and applicable approaches to include the uncertainty in crop planning and productive resources management. Using the multi-objective Fuzzy Goal Programming (FGP) approach, the farming system of a rural region located in the central of Iran has investigated in this study in order to identify the optimal cropping pattern and land use planning under uncertainty. For this purpose, several objectives like maximizing the area under cultivation, net return and employment opportunities and simultaneously the land, capital, monthly water and labor force requirements and availabilities, crop rotation and a crop lower bound production constraint imprecisely considered as fuzzy goals. The needed data gathered through fieldwork operations. In multi-objective programming context, as the results revealed, the constraints of the productive resources are more determinant in land allocation than the objective functions. To illustrate the precedence of the cited FGP model, the results were quantitatively compared with the existing situation and a crisp goal programming model containing the same objectives and constraints. The precedence mainly pertained to the goals of objective functions. The crop-mix in FGP pattern change achieved considerable conservation of water and capital resources and improvement of income generation of the agricultural system, with almost no variation in the cultivation area.Key words: Rural farming system, optimal cropping, uncertainty, fuzzy multi-objective programming
INTRODUCTIONMathematical Programming (MP) has been a widely used tool for studying and analyzing agricultural systems. Beginning with the well-known Linear Programming (LP) model, operations research has supplied us with a great variety of theoretically sound models (Lara and Stancu-Minasian, 1999). Optimization procedures have been receiving much attention in agricultural economic research over several decades. The LP is a single objective optimization technique and most of the farm planning problems are multi-objective in nature. Crop area planning or agricultural planning arenas involve multiple, conflicting and non-commensurable criteria and a compromise satisfying decision is looking for. Issues of risk, resources conservation and sustainability, environmental quality and social aspects of farming systems are as important as economic efficiency. It is clearly impossible to develop a single objective that satisfies all