The Issues/The Need
Serious questions have arisen over the long-term sustainability of intensive modern agriculture. Already, it is clear that these practices are having negative consequences on the environment, causing ground water pollution, eutrophication of river, lake, and ocean ecosystems, and contributing to global climate change. The industrial food production system’s reliance on fossil-fuel energy further threatens its sustainability in the face of potential shortages. But with the world population expected to reach 8-10 billion by the mid 21st century, the looming pressures on agriculture to produce will not soon subside. Agricultural intensification will have to continue around the world, and farmers will have to reconcile the increased need for production with the need for energy conservation and environmental protection.

The Illinois Farm Sustainability Calculator aims to quantify the long-term sustainability of modern agriculture and uses sophisticated Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for calculations and modeling.

Typical agricultural research has often focused on one particular aspect of agriculture such as optimizing the productivity of dairy cows or mapping the response of corn to fertilizer, but ignored all areas of interaction among disciplines and specialties. Although such an approach helps to advance knowledge in particular areas and often helps further the productivity of the industrial agricultural system, it fails to see the farm for what it truly is, a complex system made up of interwoven energy and nutrient cycles embedded in an even more complex system of social, economic and ecological cycles. IFSC seeks to remedy that situation by providing a tool that can analyze a farm as a holistic agroecosystem, evaluating both the productivity and sustainability of the farm.

How it Works
IFSC is a large Microsoft Excel spreadsheet consisting of over 200 interrelated pages. Embedded in the model is a vast amount of data concerning crop productivity, carbon sequestration and emissions, energy use for different types of tillage and buildings, alternative energy production, and many other subjects. The data was pulled from a multitude of sources including the National Research Council, the USDA, the EPA, and various academic journals, university extensions, and industry websites.

Above is an example of the crop data that users input for each field.

Users download the Excel file and input their own data from their own farm including soil information, the production area of each crop, nutrients added to the fields, tillage methods, the number and type of animals raised, livestock diets, energy sources used, building energy use, product hauling distances etc. IFSC takes these inputs, analyzes them along with the source data, and produces a large amount of information for the user.

In addition to crop calculations, farmers also aggregate details for livestock.

The main balance sheet is a sustainability summary, providing the user with important results such as the farm’s total energy production minus its total consumption, its total carbon sequestration minus its total carbon emissions, total nitrate runoff, the amount of animal feed produced minus the amount consumed, and the number of people the farm can feed. Subsequent balance sheets provide more detail such as the total amount of canola biodiesel that is being produced, the amount of energy being used to pump water, the amount of carbon emission the farm’s wind turbines are offsetting, the amount of nitrous oxide being emitted from a particular cornfield, how much beet molasses the farm needs to purchase, the potassium content of the quail manure produced on the farm, and many, many other potentially useful details. In other words, the main balance sheet tells the user whether or not their particular farm design is sustainable, and if it is not, the subsequent sheets provide clues as to how it might become sustainable. The user can then go back and make changes to her farm’s design and IFSC will update the balance numbers, giving the user valuable information on how changes on their farm affect both their productivity and the environment.

IFSC aggregates and summarizes a number sustainability indicators including greenhouse gas and energy balances as well as farm efficiency metrics.

Application
The initial application of IFSC was in the development of a sustainable master plan for the University of Illinois’ Dudley Smith Farm, a 225 acre farm in Christian County, Illinois. The first column of data under “baseline farm” shows IFSC’s analysis of the farm under its current management practices consisting of a continuous rotation of corn and cattle grazing both pasture and corn stover. The operational and cultural practices of the baseline farm follow those typical of Central Illinois and the Midwest as a whole, both in tillage and nutrient application.

This summary shows the dramatic improvements that can be realized with a managed approach.

Starting with the baseline farm, various scenarios, animal stocking rates, and best management practices were tested in IFSC. Using a guess-and-check strategy, a blueprint for a sustainable farm/agroecosystem was developed. The redesigned farm incorporates a mix of operational, cultural, and technological systems to create a farm plan that produces all energy needed for its operation, offsets all of the energy embodied in its inputs, sequesters carbon, produces all animal feeds needed on-site, imports no nutrients, and reduces nitrate runoff.

Advantages
IFSC serves to bridge the gap between academic research and the farmers (and the society) who could stand to benefit from it. It quickly and easily makes mountains of useful data available in an easily-digestible, locally-adapted form. Using IFSC, the farmer, extension educator, researcher or student does not have to look at a single algebraic equation, yet can still see the results of complex yield, energy and greenhouse gas calculations.

A further advantage IFSC provides is its ability to examine where disputes between prior research studies may lie. For example, many large studies have been conducted to investigate the energy productivity and carbon balance of corn ethanol production. Estimates range from net losses of energy and net emissions of CO2 to impressive gains of energy along with carbon sequestration. It is unlikely that any of these studies are completely right or completely wrong, and a farmer, policymaker or voter, seeing this conflicting evidence would be led to inaction, standing by whatever opinion they held previously. They are unlikely to delve into the detailed methods sections of the studies in question to figure out the reason behind the disparities. But by replacing assumptions with input variables, IFSC can quickly dispatch with absolutes to show the nuances of which study is correct under which conditions.

Open-Source Software
The Illinois Farm Sustainability Calculator was conceived from the start to be an open-source project. Although it is “complete” as a useful, stand-alone application, its accuracy and functionality need not be limited to that which is currently within its sphere.

New research results can be integrated into the model by adjusting existing formulas and new functions can be added by adding calculation sheets and adding cells to the output sheets. This is a crucial part of any open-source program, but unlike most open-source programs, IFSC’s potential reviewers and refiners are not programmers, but experts in agricultural and ecological fields. The short learning curve of Excel programming allows experts to get involved in IFSC and inject their own knowledge without getting bogged down in computer code.

The Illinois Farm Sustainability Calculator can be downloaded at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ifsc/ or http://www.ideals.uiuc.edu/handle/2142/13458

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Peter Mcavoy and Timothy Marten developed the Illinois Farm Sustainability Calculator at the University of Illinois Department of Landscape Architecture with funding from the Dudley Smith Initiative; e-mails: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

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