Projects by Discipline / Water Resources Planning and Management

Farm Budget Software

Hydrosphere developed software for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to perform economic analyses of representative agricultural operations in order to assess ability to repay contract obligations and support major water projects.

The farm budget software is used to determine an agricultural region's payment capacity, which is the estimated residual net farm income of irrigators available to pay both federally and non-federally assessed water costs, after deducting on-farm production and investment expenses.

Analysis is based upon farm data that is used to represent a given agricultural area in terms of farm size, cropping patterns, crop yields, prices received, typical livestock operations, land values and other economic parameters. Representative farms can include up to eight crops, thirty-two secondary crop products, and four livestock operations. The farm budget software determines labor requirement; equipment utilization, expenses, and depreciation; itemized crop expenses; total farm investment; interest on debt; and taxes.

The application was developed in Visual Basic (hosted within Excel) and features an extensive user interface, on-line help system, and automates the creation of result summaries.