Evaluating alternative farming systems: A case study for eastern Nebraska

U.S. agriculture is characterized by trends toward fewer and larger farms, fewer farmers, and a shift in economic power from the farm sector to the inputs and marketing sectors. Reversing these trends will require the development of viable alternatives to conventional cash grain farms and other large-scale farming enterprises. Toward this end, the USDA National Commission on Small Farms has called for the development of farm management models emphasizing lower capital investment, more intensive management, and increased income through high value crops and creative marketing. The best information on alternative farming systems comes from those farmers who actually take approaches outside of the mainstream. Unfortunately, these unconventional farmers are often few in number, and many of the alternative systems that could potentially work in various regions have not been tried. Adoption of new systems without preliminary evaluation is risky. Economic and environmental models of farming systems offer a means of evaluating a wide range of alternative farming systems at low cost and no risk. While there are many computer models of farming systems, other approaches can also serve for preliminary assessments and as teaching tools. This dissertation demonstrates a low-cost procedure for conducting economic, energy, and environmental analyses of farming systems, and for synthesizing the results into a qualitative assessment of relative sustainability. The approach uses data from readily available sources, and can be tailored to meet the particular questions of a specific region or type of agriculture. It is designed to serve as both an educational and a research tool. The approach is demonstrated by evaluating five alternative farming systems for eastern Nebraska--conventional corn/soybean, modified conventional, agroforestry, organic, and pasture-based beef. Parameters used to evaluate the five systems include net income, income variability, per acre production costs and returns for each crop, weekly labor requirements, energy budgets, soil erosion, and nutrient budgets. The results suggest that farming systems can be developed that allow smaller farms to be economically and environmentally competitive with larger conventional farms