The rice‐fish system has gained significant interest in recent years because of its effective usage of limited land and freshwater resources. To scientifically guide the improvement of rice field fishery production, the data in this study were selected from the latest China Fishery Statistical Yearbook, and therefore the development of paddy aquaculture was investigated. In order to more precisely predict the production of rice‐fish in China, this paper introduces an artificial neural network with the SSA‐BP model, which solves the drawbacks of the BP neural network such as easy to fall into local optimum and slow convergence speed when it is used for prediction. Firstly, the SSA‐BP model incorporates the aquaculture area (split by water area), the national freshwater fish seedling output, the national end‐of‐year ownership of inland fishing vessels, the number of freshwater fisheries practitioners as input variables, and the production of rice‐fish as an output variable; secondly, the SSA optimization algorithm was used to find the optimal initial thresholds and weights for the BP neural network, and finally the SSA‐BP prediction model was constructed. The results revealed that the overall expansion of the rice field fishery was swift in the last five years, and the output of cultivated fish in China’s rice fields rose by nearly 20% yearly in the past five years. Compared with the BP neural network and GA‐BP models, the accuracy of the SSA‐BP prediction model was enhanced by 61.01% and 16.15%, respectively, which was more suited for predicting the production of rice‐fish.

Under varying demand, pump states, load allocation, speed settings, and supply pressure are strongly coupled in parallel pumping systems. This study develops a steady-state energy-efficiency optimization framework for homogeneous and heterogeneous three-branch systems by integrating continuous pump-performance modeling, hard hydraulic-feasibility handling, mixed-variable optimization, and demand-dependent pressure regulation. An improved snake optimizer (ISO) is constructed through targeted strategies for population initialization, global exploration, and local exploitation. Flow–head and flow–power models established from LVR5-5 and CDL3-50 experimental data achieved a total-power MAPE of 2.36% and R² = 0.9972 over 40 implemented steady-state schemes. Deterministic constrained solutions for all effective pump-state combinations were used as references for the pumping-system optimization. Under the same budget of 21,000 function evaluations, ISO, SO, PSO, DE, and GA completed 1500 independent runs; ISO achieved the best overall search performance, with all 300 runs reaching the 0.1% neighborhood of the reference solution and the lowest mean NAUC and final gaps. Using ISO for both pressure-control modes, variable-pressure operation reduced mean power consumption by 10.92% and 7.51% for the homogeneous and heterogeneous systems, respectively, relative to constant-pressure operation under the same minimum service-pressure requirement. The results demonstrate that combining high-quality mixed-variable optimization with demand-dependent pressure regulation can effectively improve the steady-state energy efficiency of parallel pumping systems.