  Intensive livestock production might have a negative environmental impact, by
producing large amounts of animal excrements, which, if not properly managed,
can contaminate nearby water bodies with nutrient excess. However, if animal
manure is exported to distant crop fields, to be used as organic fertilizer,
pollution can be mitigated. It is a single-objective optimization problem, in
regards to finding the best solution for the logistics process of satisfying
nutrient crops needs by means of livestock manure. This paper proposes a
dynamic approach to solve the problem, based on a decentralized nature-inspired
cooperative technique, inspired by the foraging behavior of ants (AIA). Results
provide important insights for policy-makers over the potential of using animal
manure as fertilizer for crop fields, while AIA solves the problem effectively,
in a fair way to the farmers and well balanced in terms of average
transportation distances that need to be covered by each livestock farmer. Our
work constitutes the first application of a decentralized AIA to this
interesting real-world problem, in a domain where swarm intelligence methods
are still under-exploited.
