Best Crop Mix & Most Gross Margin

The one that puts your scarcest resource to its most valuable use. The optimizer ranks every enterprise by gross margin earned per unit of the limiting resource (e.g. gross margin per labour-day if labour is tight), then allocates land greedily to the highest-ranked enterprises first until a resource runs out. The result is the area-per-enterprise mix with the largest total gross margin your land, labour, water and capital can support.

A binding constraint is the resource that runs out first — the one stopping you from earning more. If your labour fills to 100% while land is only 70% used, labour is binding: buying or renting more land changes nothing until you free up labour. Knowing the binding constraint tells you exactly where to invest (more workers, drip to save water, a working-capital loan) to lift the whole farm's margin.

By a greedy ratio heuristic. The tool finds the scarcest resource (lowest supply ÷ average demand), ranks enterprises by gross margin per unit of that resource, and fills the highest-ranked enterprise up to the point where land, labour, water, capital or its own rotational cap is reached — then moves to the next. For the single-binding, monotone enterprise budgets used in extension work this returns the same mix a textbook linear program does.

Gross margin = gross output value − variable (input) costs, per hectare, per season. It deliberately excludes fixed costs like land rent and machinery depreciation, because those don't change with the crop you pick. Comparing enterprises on gross margin per unit of the scarce resource is the standard way farm-management handbooks decide what to grow.

It is what one more unit of that resource would add to your gross margin at the optimum. The tool estimates it as the marginal (last-funded) enterprise's gross margin per unit of the resource. If the shadow value of land is high, an extra hectare is worth a lot; if it is near zero, land is not your limit and renting more would be wasted money.

Only if land is your binding constraint. If the optimizer shows land at 100% and a high shadow value, each extra hectare earns roughly that shadow value in gross margin — compare it against the rent or purchase cost. If land sits idle because labour, water or capital binds first, more land adds nothing until you relax the resource that is actually full.

Because a non-land resource binds first. If you only have enough labour-days or water to farm part of your area at the high-margin enterprises, the rest of the land stays empty in the optimal plan — running a low-margin crop on it could even lose money. Idle land is a signal to fix the tighter constraint, not to plant something marginal.

Yes. The built-in gross margins are mid-range planning figures from FAO, ICAR-CACP and USDA-ERS enterprise budgets in a currency-neutral index. Pick your currency and treat the figures as a starting template; the structure — gross margin versus land, labour, water and capital coefficients — is what drives the answer, so scale the margins to your season for a tailored plan.

It is the highest-ranked enterprise that received zero area in the optimal mix — the first thing you would add if you could relax the binding constraint. The tool names it and its gross margin per hectare so you know which enterprise to bring in once you free up labour, water or capital, rather than guessing.

A single-crop calculator tells you the margin of one crop in isolation. This optimizer compares a whole mix of 24 enterprises against four binding resources at once and finds the combination that maximizes total farm gross margin — and, crucially, tells you which resource is the limiting factor. That whole-farm, multi-constraint view is the gap most calculators leave open.

It depends entirely on which resource binds. With ample labour and capital, 20 ha of high-margin horticulture can out-earn 100 ha of cereals. The optimizer shows whether your 20 ha is fully used and what mix it supports; if land is binding with a high shadow value, scaling up helps, but if labour or water binds first, intensifying the existing area is the better move.

Often, yes. Thirsty enterprises like sugarcane (about 18 ML/ha) and banana (about 14 ML/ha) can exhaust an irrigation allocation long before land or labour. When water is binding, the optimizer favours high gross-margin-per-megalitre enterprises — that is why a pulse or oilseed that sips water can beat a cane crop on a water-short farm.