Robust Crop Planning under Uncertainty: Aligning Economic Optimality with Agronomic Sustainability

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Multi-Layer Robust Crop Planning Framework that combines spatial, temporal, and robust optimization techniques to improve sustainable and resilient agricultural planning under uncertainty.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel integrated framework that explicitly models crop interactions and employs distributionally robust optimization for resilient crop planning.

Findings

Increased legume planting ratio compared to baselines.

Generated sustainable crop rotation patterns that restore soil fertility.

Resolved the trade-off between economic optimality and stability.

Abstract

Long-horizon agricultural planning requires optimizing crop allocation under complex spatial heterogeneity, temporal agronomic dependencies, and multi-source environmental uncertainty. Existing approaches often either address crop interactions, such as legume-cereal complementarity, only implicitly or rely on static deterministic formulations that fail to ensure resilience against market and climate volatility.To address these challenges, we propose a Multi-Layer Robust Crop Planning Framework (MLRCPF) that integrates spatial reasoning, temporal dynamics, and robust optimization. Specifically, we formalize crop-to-crop relationships through a structured interaction matrix embedded within the state-transition logic, and employ a distributionally robust optimization layer to mitigate worst-case risks defined by a data-driven ambiguity set. Evaluations on a real-world high-mix farming dataset from North China demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The framework autonomously generates sustainable checkerboard rotation patterns that restore soil fertility, significantly increasing the legume planting ratio compared to deterministic baselines. Economically, it successfully resolves the trade-off between optimality and stability. These results highlight the importance of explicitly encoding domain-specific structural priors into optimization models for resilient decision-making in complex agricultural systems.