Sustainable resources management and allocation in agricultural systems: using non-linear mathematical models Section 2 . Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology Sustainable resources management and allocation in agricultural systems: using non- linear

Abstract Sustainable agricultural development depends strongly on the socio-economic and bioecological attributes and optimal resource utilization as well. The high level of integration of the environmental, economic and social components of farming systems, implies that dynamics of these components need to be taken in to account in evaluation of agricultural sustainability. This paper introduces two ratio objective functions "net return / water consumption" and "labor employment / water consumption" in order to assess the sustainability of a rural farming system by simultaneously optimizing these ratio indicators and subsequently determining the optimal cropping pattern. Aimed to this, a fractional programming (FP) procedure has been employed in two forms of single and multiple objective programming. The results were finally explained and compared with the LP solutions in a quantitative manner