CROPS, the Crop Rotation Planning System

for Whole-farm Planning

Goal: To integrate various planning goals into a comprehensive computer decision aid for farmers. CROPS is designed to help farmers who want to move toward more sustainable farming, who want to comply with soil conservation guidelines, who want to manage nutrients and pesticides safely, and who want to ensure that their farming operation remains profitable throughout this transition.

CROPS is a computer program that selects crop rotations for each field on individual farms, ensuring that the combined crop rotations, i.e. the whole-farm plan, meets the production and financial needs of farmers, while also implementing sustainable agricultural practices. The planning system in CROPS is derived from artificial intelligence research and allows it to evaluate an entire farm's inventory of fields, considering individual field soil type, crop suitability, erosion potential, and pesticide and nutrient leaching and runoff. Crop rotation and conservation tillage plans are then suggested for each field which ensure compatibility of rotations among all fields on the farm to meet the farmer's cropping preferences and production goals. The system then uses crop budgets, simulation, and numerical analyses to determine the whole-farm plan's economic viability and effects on environmental quality.

CROPS is being developed with cooperation and/or funding from:

1. USDA/CSRS Program in Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE), one of the projects supported with ACE (Agriculture in Concert with the Environment) program of the EPA.

2. The Soil Conservation Service, through Virginia SCS. We are currently porting CROPS to run under Unix and to take advantage of SCS databases and mapping software (GRASS/CAMPS).

3. The Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation, Division of Soil and Water Conservation has cooperated in the development of and is using a nutrient management program based on algorithms in CROPS for nutrient needs assessment. The nutrient management algorithms from this project are being linked into CROPS.

4. The Virginia Corn Board funded the development of an expert system on field corn IPM and its linkage to CROPS so that the system can anticipate appropriate insect pest problems when planning for corn production in Virginia.