Land-use comparison tool
The Farmland Use Optimizer
For landowners and farmers who want to see — side by side, on their specific acres — whether row crops, cash rent, CRP, solar, or wind actually pays the most.
The AgriTerra Land-Use Optimizer is a free tool that ranks the ways you could use a parcel — keep it in row crops, cash-rent it, enroll acres in CRP, lease it for solar, or host wind — by projected per-acre return. It is built for landowners and farmers weighing a change of use, and it draws its numbers from USDA NASS cash-rent benchmarks, USDA ERS crop cost-of-production figures, USDA FSA conservation rates, and NREL solar and wind models keyed to your exact parcel.
How the optimizer works
- Drop a pin or search an address. Scout finds the parcel on the satellite map and measures its acreage. Where the parcel layer isn’t live yet, you outline it with the draw tool — a partial slice of a bigger field works too.
- Scout pulls the parcel’s data in parallel. Soil capability class from NRCS SSURGO, current land use from USDA CropScape, county cash-rent benchmarks from USDA NASS, and modeled solar and wind output from NREL — all read for that specific parcel.
- Five uses are scored to a per-acre return. Row crops (revenue minus ERS cost of production), cash rent (the county benchmark), CRP (the FSA rental rate on eligible acres), solar (an income band from PVWatts output), and wind (a band from the parcel’s wind class).
- Adjust your priorities. Weight the ranking toward income, stability, or keeping the option to farm — the order re-sorts as you move the sliders, so the answer reflects what matters to you, not a one-size default.
- Read the ranked list. Each use shows its projected return and the source line behind it, so you can see not just which use wins but by how much and on what basis.
What the numbers are based on
The optimizer never invents a figure. Each use is scored from a named public dataset, and the source and the date it was read travel with the number:
- Cash rent — USDA NASS county cash-rent benchmarks (low / mid / high), refreshed on the annual USDA cycle.
- Row-crop return — USDA ERS Commodity Costs & Returns for the cost side, against the parcel’s current crop from USDA CropScape (CDL).
- CRP — USDA FSA Conservation Reserve Program rental rates, applied to acres the soil data flags as likely eligible.
- Solar — NREL PVWatts v8 modeled annual output for the parcel, compared to the state’s output percentiles to place it in a low / mid / high income band mirrored from the annual Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory lease reports.
- Wind — a coarse NREL Wind Toolkit resource class from the parcel’s state and latitude, read against the matching state-and-class income band.
Two things to hold in mind. The energy bands are deliberately coarse in this version — the wind class comes from latitude rather than a full wind-resource raster, and solar percentiles are sampled — so treat them as “is this worth a call,” not a quote. And where a dataset has no entry for your location, the tool says so rather than filling the gap with a guess.
Two quick illustrations of the kind of numbers you’ll see (examples, not your parcel): a productive central-Ohio parcel might benchmark near $180/acre cash rent against a modeled corn return in a similar range, while a modeled solar band on flat ground near a substation can land in the $800–$1,400/acre range — an order-of-magnitude gap that is exactly the point the optimizer exists to surface.
A worked example
A 160-acre parcel in Huron County, Ohio. The owner farms corn and soybeans but keeps getting solar-lease letters. Run through the optimizer, the parcel’s SSURGO soils come back as good-but-not-prime, its NASS county cash rent benchmarks in the mid-$100s per acre, and its ERS-based corn return in the same neighborhood — a normal Corn Belt result.
The solar band, driven by strong PVWatts output and flat terrain, ranks well above both farming and cash rent per acre — but the tool also flags that ~15 low-lying acres read as CRP-eligible, where the FSA rental rate beats farming them at a loss. Weighting the ranking toward “keep the option to farm” pushes cash rent and CRP up and solar down, because a solar lease is a 20–30 year commitment. The owner leaves with a ranked, sourced comparison to take to an attorney — not a hunch.
Who it’s for
Landowners deciding what to do with ground they’ve inherited or stopped farming, active farmers weighing whether a marginal field earns more in a program than in production, and investors sizing up a parcel’s upside before an offer. If your next question after “which use pays most” is “so should I farm, lease for solar, or enroll in CRP,” the farm vs. solar vs. CRP calculator takes the top options and lays them out on income, capital, reversibility, and risk.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the Land-Use Optimizer cost?
- It is free to run on any U.S. parcel — no account and no card. The ranking, the per-acre numbers, and the assumptions behind them are all in the free view. The optional $39 land report packages the same analysis, plus flood, wetlands, and program detail, into a downloadable 20-page PDF.
- Do I need an account to use it?
- No. You can pick a parcel and see all five uses ranked without signing up. An email only comes into play if you want the full PDF report emailed to you.
- Where do the return figures come from?
- Cash rent is USDA NASS county benchmarks; crop returns use USDA ERS cost-of-production figures against current CropScape land use; CRP uses USDA FSA rental-rate data; and solar and wind income are modeled from NREL PVWatts and the NREL Wind Toolkit, expressed as the same seed bands developers and landowners cite in real leases. Every figure carries the source it came from.
- How accurate are the solar and wind numbers?
- They are defensible seed bands, not lease offers. The solar figure compares your parcel’s modeled PVWatts output to your state’s output percentiles; the wind figure assigns a coarse resource class. They tell you whether energy income is worth pursuing and roughly at what scale — not what a single developer will pay you.
- Does it work in my state?
- The federal data layers behind the returns — USDA, NREL, USDA FSA — are nationwide, so any of the 50 states can be analyzed. Pre-loaded parcel boundaries are live in Ohio and Indiana first and expanding; elsewhere you can outline the parcel on the map.
- Can I use it on my phone?
- Yes. The optimizer runs in the browser on mobile and desktop — no app to install.
Related tools
Decide
Compare farming, a solar lease, and CRP on 5-year income, capital, reversibility, and risk.
farm vs. solar vs. CRP calculator →Crop Budget
Model per-acre seed, fertilizer, and operating costs against revenue and breakeven.
crop budget calculator →USDA Programs
See which USDA conservation and commodity programs your parcel likely qualifies for.
USDA program eligibility checker →Or see all six free farmland tools.
See which use your acres pay most in.
Run the free optimizer on any U.S. parcel — five uses ranked by projected return, each with its source, in under a minute.
Free to use without an account. The full 20-page PDF report is $39.