Cost-optimal Seeding Strategy During a Botanical Pandemic in Domesticated Fields

Context: Botanical pandemics cause enormous economic damage and food shortage around the globe. However, since botanical pandemics are here to stay in the short-medium term, domesticated field owners can strategically seed their fields to optimize each session's economic profit. Objective: Given the pathogen's epidemiological properties, we aim to find an economically optimal grid-based seeding strategy for field owners and policymakers. Methods: We propose a novel epidemiological-economic mathematical model that describes the economic profit from a field of plants during a botanical pandemic. We describe the epidemiological dynamics using a spatio-temporal extended Susceptible-Infected-Recovered epidemiological model with a non-linear output epidemiological model. Results and Conclusions: We provide an algorithm to obtain an optimal grid-formed seeding strategy to maximize economic profit, given field and pathogen properties. In addition, we implement the proposed model in realistic settings, analyzing the sensitivity of the economic profit as a function of several epidemiological and economic properties. We show that the recovery and basic infection rates have a similar economic influence. Unintuitively, we show that in the context of a botanic pandemic, a larger farm does not promise higher economic profit. Significance: Our results demonstrate a significant benefit of using the proposed seeding strategy and shed more light on the dynamics of the botanical pandemic in domesticated fields.