Modelling Farm Growth and Its Impact on Agricultural Land Use: A Country Scale Application of an Agent-Based Model
Authored by Veronique Beckers, Jeroen Beckers, Matthias Vanmaercke, Hecke Etienne Van, Rompaey Anton Van, Nicolas Dendoncker
Date Published: 2018
DOI: 10.3390/land7030109
Sponsors:
Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO)
Platforms:
Java
Model Documentation:
Other Narrative
Flow charts
Model Code URLs:
https://github.com/veroniquebeckers/ADAM
Abstract
The ongoing economic pressure on farmers has resulted in lower gross
margins, lower income, and a continuous decrease in the number of
farmers in large parts of the world. Most remaining farmers upscale
their activities by taking over the land of their former competitors,
resulting in a decrease in agricultural employment and an increase in
average farm size, accompanied by specialisation and new management
techniques. Understanding these significant trends and their impact on
the land use and environment requires a deeper knowledge of the
mechanisms involved and the impacts of different policy measures. These
processes are ideally represented through agent-based modelling.
Currently, agent-based models are rarely for larger regions. This paper
presents ADAM (Agricultural Dynamics through Agent-based Modelling),
using it for the case study of Belgium. ADAM was created to obtain
insights in past and current agricultural trends and to explore possible
effects of policy measures. ADAM simulates the evolution of a farmer
population and their farms at a fine scale on the country level. It
produces yearly outputs on the number of farms, their size, and the type
of farming activity on every parcel. Results show that ADAM is capable
of adequately modelling a farmer population according to past trends and
that it can be used to explore the results of a business-as-usual
scenario, therefore showing the possibility of creating agent-based
models for larger scale real-world applications.
Tags
Agent-based modelling
Agriculture
Management
Dynamics
Landscape
Heterogeneity
Policy
Ecosystem services
Intensification
Europe
Ecological impacts
Real-world application
Agricultural
dynamics
Farmer population
Farm evolution
Adam model
Country scale
Rural-areas