By Samantha McReavy
Improving the sustainability of farms while maintaining profitability is essential to protect the livelihood of farmers and the health of the planet. Farmers need to be profitable to stay in business. But they also need to look after their farms to keep producing food for the long run.
That’s where profitability mapping comes in. These maps show farmers an estimate of how much money they are making—or losing—on specific areas of their farm.
Virginia Capmourteres, formerly a research associate in the School of Environmental Sciences, was part of a team of researchers that developed profitability maps for a variety of Ontario farms. Each map is unique to the farm being analyzed and shows profit at a high spatial resolution of farmland. The maps incorporate data on crop yields, market prices and management costs to ensure accurate profit predictions. This information will help farmers make informed economic and environmental decisions about their land.
“Profitability maps allow farmers to strategically plan out farmland based on yield and cost data,” says Capmourteres. “This will prevent farmers from investing time and money into unproductive areas. Instead, they can convert these areas into alternative management land uses, such as cover crops or wildflower beds.”
Capmourteres says redirecting unproductive land into conservation areas is an efficient, non-invasive way to improve productivity and sustainability on farms. Cover crops can be used to improve soil structure and nutrient content, prevent erosion and promote biodiversity. While wildflowers attract pollinators to the area—increasing the fertilization of plants needed for fruit and crop production— they also provide a necessary food source for pollinators.
But why use profitability mapping when yield mapping—another form of data collection that produces maps displaying a field’s crop production—is widely available?
“It is really important to present crop yield in a more tangible way,” says Capmourteres.
“By collecting data on various expenses and returns, we can easily communicate profit or loss within specific areas of their farm, which is something yield maps wouldn’t show.”
For this project, researchers translated crop yield data provided by farmers into cost and profit data, using crop budgets and market prices provided by the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. This was done by interviewing farmers and collecting data that identified the expenses of running their farms, such as crop protection, fertilizer and labour.
Analyzing and incorporating this data into the crop yield maps allowed researchers to create a highly detailed, easy-to-understand and colour-coded map that displays where money is gained and where money is lost across these farms.
“There are many reasons why farmland is unproductive—weather and soil conditions can play a role,” says Capmourteres. “Monitoring these fields over multiple harvests is essential to ensure that temporary or alterable issues aren’t the reason for an unproductive area, which is why we collected data over time.”
When lower yield is observed in an area, various crop enhancement approaches can be enacted to help improve yield. But in some cases, farmers can over-invest in tools without seeing a proportional improvement in yield. That’s when they could consider designating that land for conservation.
“Regardless of how much fertilizer and time goes into an area, some parts of farmland are simply unproductive,” says Capmourteres. “Converting unproductive agricultural land into conservation areas will prevent farmers from losing money and promote sustainability in their practices.”
Capmourteres and her team connected with farmers on 40 farms to collect information on their expenses, yield and profit to create more individually tailored maps.
The information on these maps can help contribute to the knowledge base of soil productivity throughout Ontario.
Others involved in this project are Drs. Madhur Anand, School of Environmental Sciences; Clarence Swanton, Department of Plant Agriculture; and Aaron Berg and Evan Fraser, Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics.
Funding is provided by Food from Thought.