Small-scale independent agriculture in the Global South is semi-isolated for most of the year from central marketing facilities, where most social communication occurs during the harvest season. General social support for information on future economic trends is informal and frequently completely unreliable, especially in highly seasonal production. Such "peasant" production is thus dependent on dramatically incomplete information when making decisions during the time of planting -- a socioeconomic issue. At the same time, collective decisions may affect growing conditions over a large area through various alterations of regional conditions (e.g., the accumulation of particular pathogens) -- an ecological issue.
Results/Conclusions
Casting the problem in a discrete time framework the composition of a simple socioeconomic model with an ecological model produces surprisingly complex behavior, including chaos, basin boundary collisions, and chaotic transients at the basin boundary.