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Cropping Systems Calculator

A conservation-focused non-profit has developed a free tool that calculates the costs and returns of various cropping systems.

Land Stewardship Project (LSP) economic researcher Rebecca Wasserman-Olin says the idea came from conversations with farmers interested in improving soil health and water quality.

“Through those conversations, (farmers) would always say cover crops sound great and this sounds like a great idea, but what’s this going to cost me and what’s this going to do to my bottom line?  So through those conversations we definitely saw a need for a resource for farmers to use, and that’s what kind of launched the Cropping Systems Calculator.”

She tells Brownfield there are many crop budget tools available, so LSP set out to create a calculator that’s easy to use and fully customizable.

“We wanted the ability to either load in defaults from the area, values that are kind of a nice baseline.  Or, if you know every cost on your operation down to the penny, you can make all those changes and get a really exact figure from that.”

Using 2014 data, the Excel-based Cropping Systems Calculator allows the comparison of two crop rotations for up to six years.

It provides average returns over the rotation, as well as year-to-year breakdowns for each crop within the rotations.