Modern agriculture places negative impacts on the environment that include ground water pollution, eutrophication of river, lake, and ocean ecosystems, and contributing to global climate change. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign set out to quantify these impacts and to see how they could improve farm performance. The result is the Illinois Sustainability Calculator that quantifies and calculates farm sustainability and tips off users to improvements they can make to become more efficient.

“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.”

Read a full feature with details about this system here.

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