Leopold Center - Take a spin on I-FARM: Create your own virtual farm

A group of local investors wants to build a biorefinery in your county and you're interested in providing biomass. How much corn stover can you harvest without affecting soil quality? What situation might make switchgrass a better option?

Here's another scenario: You're thinking about changing from a conventional dairy to a grass-based dairy. How much would it cost to use marginal cropland for pasture in a rotational grazing system?

A new web-based program, I-FARM, brings the answer right to your computer, allowing you to run "what if" scenarios on virtual or actual farms.

The Leopold Center has been a cooperator with Iowa State University and other partners in a three-state USDA-funded project designed to explore farming systems choices that mix crops and animals. This is in contrast to today's more common farming model, in which crops and animals are in separate, specialized operations. One outcome has been I-FARM, which lets farmers, managers and policymakers see what happens at the farm scale in terms of economic returns and environmental impact.

"This is a planning tool for exploring alternatives in a fairly rigorous and realistic way," said agricultural engineer Tom Richard, who helped initiate the project at ISU and has since brought it to Pennsylvania State University where he is now a member of the faculty. "What could take years and a lot of money to try in the real world, you can do in about an hour."

I-FARM is unique because it has both crop and livestock enterprises in the same model. The model has weather and soils data for 16 states and variables for just about everything -- from how often and when you cultivate a field to the local price for alfalfa.

Information can be entered for a range of crops and crop rotations, plus tillage, fertilization, planting, weed control, harvesting and residue removal. Swine, cattle and dairy production are modeled based on feed intake, growth rate, grazing or confinement operations, and manure management systems. Users can select options that fit their farm or interests, and enter other information such as payments to lending institutions for land, buildings and machinery investments.

The model calculates a long list of results. Soil losses, the farm's energy and labor requirements, what's produced in terms of crops, livestock and manure to be used as fertilizer, and residue that could be harvested for biomass are shown, plus annual earnings or losses. Nutrients are listed by field, and subsidy and conservation payments are calculated based on current programs. Users can change any of the variables, and run the model again to see the impact on their bottom line as well as the environment.

Richard and others have been using I-FARM to study effective ways to harvest biomass for production of renewable energy. They set up a typical 1,000-acre grain farm in five different areas of Iowa, ran the simulation and found some regional differences.

"In the north central region, where production is much higher, you can take a lot of corn stover biomass off the land with minimal environmental impact," he explained. "So in that region it makes sense to harvest biomass as corn stover, and you can still receive commodity payments," he explained.

"In other regions, it makes more sense to put in switchgrass for biomass, because harvesting corn stover leads to too much erosion and a decrease in soil organic matter," Richard said. "As we know, current farm policies rarely encourage this kind of land use, but the model helps document these impacts and find what will work in specific situations."

Richard said I-FARM also can help producers evaluate conservation incentives, such as the Conservation Security Program, with the potential to improve both economic and environmental outcomes on the farm.

I-FARM developer Ed van Ouwerkerk is working with a graduate student Amritpal Kang to make the system easier to use. Rather than selecting from a list of soil types for each field, users enter a location on a map, which takes them to an aerial photograph of the farm. The program then automatically enters soil type, hill slopes and other field-specific details already available on public spatial databases. The new feature should be ready for use in Iowa by the end of August 2005.

The development group includes representatives from the Departments of Agronomy, Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, Economics and Animal Science at ISU; the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development; National Soil Tilth Laboratory and Practical Farmers of Iowa. The University of Maine and Michigan State University also are involved in the project. In addition to the USDA funds, other grants have been obtained from the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

To use the I-FARM program, go to the web site: http://i-farmtools.org, and go to the web application link at the top of the page.

You'll be asked to sign in, which is simply a way to save your information for later use. Set aside a block of time to enter the data to set up your own farm, or you can retrieve any one of more than 30 sample farms that have data already entered.

Up to 20 people can use I-FARM at one time, and you can save your "farm" and revisit it as many times as you want to experiment with different choices.

The web site has a short tutorial and answers to commonly asked questions. The sample farms are based on soil and climate conditions in Montgomery, Fayette, O'Brien, Henry and Story counties in Iowa.

Here's a sample 1,000-acre grain and pork farm. It is based on soils in Montgomery County in southwest Iowa, of which 158 acres are continuous corn for feed in the livestock operation, 541 acres are in a corn-soybean rotation, and 301 acres are enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program. The farm includes a conventional hog confinement building to raise feeder pigs.

Selected results: