Let’s Start a Farm!

Are you starting a new farm in Indiana? Are you not sure what combination of corn, soy beans, and diary cows will make you the most profits while reducing your farm’s CO2 emissions and water usage? If you are part of the millions who said yes, this tool is for you!

Use this Link to the full description of the tool: https://www.notion.so/bearington/Design-Journal-Entry-Share-Your-Design-Due-Jun-1-01a8a9aa5c454aff91030f1c7eedd064?p=1407d7c98e574b3e81c4da86b94a06c1

Welcome to Let’s Start a Farm! - Read Me!

This tool is immediately fully operational with already inputted with well researched assumptions to help you decide how much of your land to dedicate to each crop and cows. However, the tool is also fully customizable to your farm, with all inputs very easy to change to more accurately reflect your farm. A full list of assumed constants is seen below:

The sources of all of these values can be found at the end of this document! If these values look good or have been changed to your liking, the next step is to run the Revit Generative Design. This will require a Revit 2021 license as well as a Generative Design License on a Windows computer, if you are a student these are both free, found at:

https://www.autodesk.com/education/edu-software/overview?sorting=featured&filters=individual

Once the generative design study is run, each user will be able to visually see the overview of how the farm’s profits, C02 emissions, and water usage are effected by the % of corn, % of soy beans, and % cows per acre on the farm. The outputs of profits, C02 emissions, and water usage are all per acre per year and can be scaled up based on the farm’s size.

The suggested inputs to the generative study if a carbon negative farm is desired would look like this:

A sample result of the generative study will look like this:

Underlying Dynamo Script

This dynamo script is set up as a generative design study. The inputs to the study are the amounts of corn, soy beans, and animals the farmer will have per acre. These values can vary from 1 to 100 per category and gets turned into a percent per acre for the calculations.

Inputs:

As described above, the dynamo script calculations rely on a large number of assumptions. These values have been well researched and Indiana average values have already been inputted for ease of use, but each value can easily be changed by the user to customize. For example, if the farmer pays a different rate for water usage or sells a liter of milk at a different price, the value can easily be changed in the constants group.

Constants Group:

With these constants, the script calculates the total amount of water usage, total CO2 emissions (or retention), and total profits expected by the farm per acre per year. These values are then outputs to the generative study.

The water usage calculation:

The CO2 emissions calculation:

The profits calculation:

Model output

To better visualize the output, the different numbers of the corn, soybeans, and animals are modeled to get a better visual representation of the break up using the following code: