Five-Way Evolutionary Game Analysis of VACR Synergy of Non-Pesticide Vegetable, Aquacultural, Non-Pesticide Rice Farming, and Plant-Feed Animal Raising for Multiple Low-To-Middle Income Farmer Families

The integration of aquaculture and agriculture (IAA) of the home lot, garden, livestock and fishpond, and rice field is referred to as the VACR system (a Vietnamese acronym: Vuon = garden, Ao = pond, Chuong = livestock pen, Ruong = rice field), not only reduce poverty, increase productivity, diversified income streams, enhanced food security but also promote biodiversity, and sustainable agricultural practices. In the perspectives of sharing economy, within a farmer’s home lot, the garden encompasses the production of various plants bearing fruits and vegetables; the shed includes livestock production; the fishpond provides aquaculture production, mainly fish and shrimp; and finally, the rice field is mainly the production of rice, a staple main food for many cultures. All elements of this production system provide food security for human. In addition, in the perspectives of circular economy, the four elements are also complementary one another, where the fishpond acts as a source of water and mud for the garden and rice-field, thereby nourishing it; the garden and rice-field provides feed for fish and livestock; and the animal stool complementarily used as fish/shrimp feed or fertilizer for the garden and rice field; also, rice field yield rice straw for livestock bedding. That VACR system, applied into a low-income famer family, could be expanded into an integrated multiple low-to-middle-income-farmer-family coalition of non-pesticide vegetable farmer family, rice farming family, shrimp farmer family, and animal raising family for the sake of both resource sharing and waste management to make the agriculture supply chain ecosystem more sustainable and efficiency. This study investigates the evolutionary game dynamics among four-party cooperation under supports/non-supports by government in the context of resource sharing and waste management aiming to increase efficiency, reduce waste, and maximize the utilization of public resources. To understand the behavior of different stakeholders under government incentive policies, we develop a multifaceted five-way evolutionary game model involving a local government (G) and a VACR synergy of four farmer families of a non-pesticide rice farming family (A), a non-pesticide vegetable farmer family (B), a plant-feed animal raising (C), and a shrimp farmer family (D). Through stability analysis, we explore equilibrium conditions of evolutionarily stable strategies (ESSs) for the quintuple evolutionary game. To ensure the robustness of our findings, we conduct a MATLAB simulation analysis, based on VACR synergy applied in Vietnam’s Mekong delta data to validate the analytical results. Our findings highlight that government supports and subsidies, the costs incurred by all parties in VACR synergy to share resource and manage waste to increase productivity, reduce reliance on external inputs, promoting sustainable and resilient farming systems, and the additional distribution income/profits derived from this synergy are critical in determining whether the evolutionary game can achieve a stable equilibrium state. This research enables all parties in VACR synergy to optimize the use of shared resources, waste management, lower operating costs, and enhance efficiency and sustainability. Additionally, government subsidy policies play a crucial role in encouraging all parties in synergy to engage in resource sharing, thereby fostering more efficiency, resource optimization, innovation, waste reduction, and collaboration to better serve agricultural supply chain ecosystem. Based on these insights, the paper offers practical recommendations to further promote the resource sharing and circular economy in agricultural production practices.