Generally SWIIM® Optimizer Input Wizard in SWIIM Planner will result in a recommended cropping pattern which will produce a much higher net return than your current practices (especially if you decrease your water allotment to allow for a portion of your CU to be leased).

However in some cases, depending on your inputs to the wizard, it may result in a very small increase in net return or even a lower future net return than your historical return.

To improve your results you should try doing one or more of the following:

Assuming you’re not yet locked into a specific water lease agreement with commensurate dollar value, you may enter a higher dollar value for leased CU water as you optimize your farm operation.  Naturally higher water lease rates will result in higher net return from the leased water.

Also assuming you don’t yet have a predetermined lease water volume, you may decrease your Water Allotment which will result in a higher volume of Available CU Water For Lease to a third-party.  You can play with water allotment values and crop options to see how they affect the resulting Available CU Water For Lease.

You may have increased the default crop prices over and above the provided NASS statistical data. Very high crop prices may make leased water less desirable.  Again, you may wish to try a few crop prices and see how the crop price affects the optimization outcome.

Double-check that your farm sizes, composition, “willing to grow” strategies, costs and water allocation are as accurate as possible.  The SWIIM Optimizer takes all of these inputs into account when modeling your farming operation.  The Optimizer will do a better job when given plenty of options to choose from.  Imagine at one extreme you give the optimizer a single field with a single crop you’re willing to grow.  You can imagine that it then will choose to either grow that crop or fallow it if the water constraint is too low for the crop.  Now imagine you give the optimizer 20 small fields (the maximum number of fields Planner will currently allow you to process) and you allow it to consider several crops per field.  It can now choose from what equates to hundreds of options and generate a crop plan that very closely matches your preferred water allotment while maximizing your income.

If you need more help, contact SWIIM Customer Support at swiimsystem.com.