Crop Rotation Planner

It depends on which crops you select for each year, but in the default sequence (corn, soybean, corn) two of the three years earn revenue at Corn Price while only one year uses Soybean Price. Wheat's price is also derived from Corn Price, at 1.2 times its value, so any rotation with more corn or wheat years will respond more strongly to Corn Price than to Soybean Price. If a rotation contains no corn or wheat year at all, Corn Price stops affecting the result entirely, and the same is true of Soybean Price in a rotation with no soybean year.

Each legume year (soybean or alfalfa) generates a nitrogen credit in pounds per acre for the crop that follows, and that credit converts to Fertilizer Savings at a flat $0.55 per pound. That dollar figure is added into the net return of the year the credit applies to, not the legume year itself, since it offsets fertilizer the following crop would otherwise need.

The yield model checks whether a crop follows itself in sequence — continuous corn (corn after corn) takes a 10% yield penalty from pest and disease carryover, and soybean planted right after corn gets a 5% yield boost from the disease and pest break the rotation provides — not from residual nitrogen, which soybeans fix for themselves — and continuous soybean or continuous wheat each take a 10% penalty for the same carryover reason corn does. The rotation wraps around, so Year 1's yield also depends on what you selected for Year 3.

No — every output here (Avg Net Return per Acre/Year, Total 3-Year Revenue/Acre, and the rest) is a per-acre figure meant to compare rotation sequences on equal footing, regardless of how many acres you actually farm. Multiply the per-acre totals by your own acreage separately if you want a whole-farm dollar figure.