Search

The optimum economic exploitation of the resources, is considered one of the economic development goals, especially, with the scarcity of agricultural resources to the most of inputs of productions in the agricultural sector. And the optimum exploitation of water resources in the Egyptian Agriculture, represents one of the most economic issues, that concern the political and economic decision makers. The research problem and objective of the study handles the nature of cropped pattern and its restrictions to achieve the maximum profit, and minimization of water requirements for the cropped pattern, that are used in irrigation through the optimum use of the available inputs, i.e., land, water irrigation, agricultural labor, and costs of production. The study applied the linear and goal programming methods for solving the optimality problems, with respect to profit maximization, and minimization of water that are used in irrigation of cropped pattern to 40 crops, where each model includes 19 winter, 16 summer, and 5 nile crops, the total acreage of the copped pattern was 12.326 million feddans, and represents about 83.6% from the total copped pattern in Egypt the reached about 14.905 million feddans in 2005. To achieve the objectives of optimum cropped pattern, linear programming models were specified and estimated, to determine the appropriate cropped pattern in each scenario. The study estimated four scenarios, that were employed to achieve the objective function, and the solutions of the mathematical linear programming models revealed many results and important indicators. The main results indicate the expected cropped pattern net return was higher than the one in the actual cropped pattern, and the water that are used in irrigation were minimized. Finally some recommendations may be used to achieve the economic utility with respect to the Egyptian economy and the state, i.e., decreasing rice, sugar cane, and cotton crops, increasing cereal crops from wheat and maize, and increasing pulses and oil crops.