Photovoltaic water pumping technology is considered as a sustainable and economical solution to provide water for irrigation, which can halt grassland degradation and promote farmland conservation in China. The appropriate design and operation significantly depend on the available solar irradiation, crop water demand, water resources and the corresponding benefit from the crop sale. In this work, a novel optimization procedure is proposed, which takes into consideration not only the availability of ground-water resources and the effect of water supply on crop yield, but also the investment cost of photovoltaic water pumping system and the revenue from crop sale. A simulation model, which combines the dynamics of photovoltaic water pumping system, groundwater level, water supply, crop water demand and crop yield, is employed during the optimization. To prove the effectiveness of the new optimization approach, it has been applied to an existing photovoltaic water pumping system. Results show that the optimal configuration can guarantee continuous operations and lead to a substantial reduction of photovoltaic array size and consequently of the investment capital cost and the payback period. Sensitivity studies have been conducted to investigate the impacts of the prices of photovoltaic modules and forage on the optimization. Results show that the water resource is a determinant factor. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.