Web-based decision support tool for robust crop planning (MORDMAgro)

Overview

MORDMAgro is a decision-support framework designed to help farmers allocate land to crop mixes when future climatic and economic conditions are uncertain. Agriculture is a cornerstone of Argentina's economy, and individual farm-level crop decisions collectively drive sector output. MORDMAgro addresses this uncertainty by combining Robust Decision-Making with scenario analysis, multi-objective optimization, robustness criteria, and supervised machine learning. The framework returns crop-mix recommendations and the underlying knowledge that explains why certain strategies perform reliably across a wide range of possible futures.

The solution is being extended into a free-access web application aimed at Argentine farmers in the pampas region. It is being developed jointly by the Engineering and Agricultural Schools at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), with field validation supported by AACREA, a non-profit farmers' association that promotes technological development in Argentine agriculture.

Technical specifications

• Robust Decision-Making core: Identifies crop-mix strategies that return acceptable performance across the largest possible share of plausible future scenarios.
• Scenario generation: Creates and explores more than 3,000 scenarios modeling climatic and economic uncertainty through supervised machine learning.
• Multi-objective optimization: Evaluates more than 2,000 crop mixes based on typical Argentinian pampas alternatives such as wheat, maize, and soybean.
• Robustness criteria: Ranks strategies by how well they perform under a wide range of conditions rather than under a single expected outcome.
• Open and reproducible scripting: Code and functions are shared with the research community for transparency and reproducibility.
• Web-based delivery: A prototype web application is planned to host the framework, making it accessible to farmers without requiring local software installation.
• Regional extension: Site-specific cost data will be gathered to broaden applicability across the entire pampas region.

Technology readiness level

The framework has been demonstrated in a published case study of a farm in the Argentinian pampas, where crop-mix recommendations were validated with field experts from AACREA. The next development phase focuses on extending the cost database to cover the broader pampas region, cleaning and documenting the shared scripts, and designing, developing, and hosting a prototype web application. Communication and outreach to local farmers are planned as part of the rollout. The underlying methodology is peer-reviewed and validated, while the web application itself is at the prototype stage.