  In order to avoid disadvantages of monocropping for soil and environment, it
is advisable to practice intercropping of various plant species whenever
possible. However, intercropping is challenging as it requires a balanced
planting schedule due to individual cultivation time frames. Maintaining a
continuous harvest reduces logistical costs and related greenhouse gas
emissions, and contributes to food waste prevention. In this work, we address
these issues and propose an optimization method for a full harvest season of
large crop ensembles that complies with given constraints. By using an approach
based on an evolutionary algorithm combined with a novel hierarchical loss
function and adaptive mutation rate, we transfer the multi-objective into a
pseudo-single-objective optimization problem and obtain faster convergence and
better solutions than for conventional approaches.
