Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture

I-FARM web program helps farmers make decisons

Back to Leopold Letter Fall 2010

By RUSS HINKELDEY, Communications intern

Looking into expanding your farm operation or making a change and can’t foresee the potential cost increase? I-FARM, a web-based program that lets people create farm scenarios based on their own land and farms, is available for farmers’ use in their own home at no cost.

The program was written by Ed van Ouwerkerk as part of a three-state, Leopold Center- and USDA-funded project to help farmers make educated decisions on how to best use their land and manage their farm operation. The goal was to create an “integrated crop and livestock production and biomass planning tool.”

When they use I-FARM, farmers can enter their operation description including figures such as how many acres of land they own and/or rent, a range of crops that could be harvested, and even how often they till the soil. An extensive range of other inputs can be included, for example, details of their animal production systems if they have one. Some of the animal system data inputs include number of hogs, cattle, or poultry, feed intake, growth rate, grazing or confinement, and manure management methods. Users can customize the results further by including information about payments on loans for land, buildings or machinery investments.

A long list of results is calculated that will help people make decisions that can improve their bottom line, protect their land from soil loss, and save money on energy and labor costs. The tool also provides numbers on how much manure or biomass can be produced, as well as payments for subsidies and conservation programs.

The model incorporates the land, weather and environmental data for all 48 of the contiguous United States.

The program has received several updates since it first debuted in July 2004. One of those is the ability to use a geographic information system (GIS) to locate a farm. The program takes the user to an aerial photo of their property and they can mark off their land and get specific figures for the soil type and slope of the land that is available from state and county databases. The newest update of I-FARM is a simplified version: I-FARM Light. It requires fewer inputs and is quicker to use, an important consideration, especially for new users.

Robert Anex, an ISU professor in Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, is involved in assessing next steps for the model. “It’s an impressive tool,” he says, “but farmers do find it challenging to use, so we hope to address that in the near future by making some changes in the user interface.”

Readers can check out this tool at its new web address: http://i-farmtools.iastate.edu.

 

Back to Leopold Letter Fall 2010