According to latest annual economic report, the agricultural and fisheries sectors contribute

around 27.4%. This agricultural sector employs more than 87% of the rural population which is
more than 80% of the total population (Government of Pontianak 2021). However the
agricultural sector is affected by various challenges that cripple its productivity including
degradation of natural resources, unreliable rainfall due to climate variability and climate change
and lack of support services and poor infrastructure (Phiri 2012). Another critical challenge
affecting agricultural production in Rasau Jaya is small scale. The size of land available for some
rural farmers is estimated that the majority of 78% of smallholders have an average land area of
less than 1.0 ha. However, small farmers contribute more than 90% of total agricultural
production. (Pontianak city government 2021).
As the population continues to grow, demand will increase which will require continuous
production. There is a critical need to find ways to increase production. This can be done through
handling the means of production, such as the size of landholdings or by increasing the
efficiency of resource use. With advances in technology and research, it is possible to increase
the efficiency of resource use and increase agricultural production in the areas of water use
(irrigation), fertilizers, plant varieties and animal species. Irrigated agriculture is one of the
solutions to increase agricultural production amid unreliable rainfall in Malawi (Chafuwa, 2017).
Whereas in the past it has been easily adopted by large-scale or commercial farming, and
evidence shows an increasing number of small-scale rural farmers are adopting the technology.
Cultivation integrated with irrigation offers hope to many poor farmers against the shocks of
climate variability and climate change, a simple decision support tool needed to help farmers
make appropriate water resource planning decisions to maximize yields with limited resources.
Several tools have been developed for planning water resources (Giupponi and Sgobbi, 2013).
However, these tools largely serve water resources development and are often too complex and
applied at large catchment scales requiring large amounts of data. This tends to ignore the
multiple and conflicting uses of water (Cai et al., 2014; Rinaldi and He, 2014). System dynamics
models are one group of tools used in studying air use and planning. For example, Phiri and
Mulungu (2019) used simulation to integrate water use and development between hydropower,
irrigation, and water supply in the Nkhata-bay district of Malawi. In their scenario simulation,
they were able to isolate the most probable options for development given the available air
resources.