Kansas State University recently introduced a computer program designed to aid irrigators in determining which crops to plant, and how much water to apply to those crops.

"The Crop Water Allocator (CWA) uses relationships between crop yields and irrigation that were developed from research conducted by K-State Research and Extension," said southwest area agricultural economist Troy Dumler. "When combined with production inputs from producers, the program will estimate which crop, or combination of crops is the most profitable. The program can be used on a field, farm, watershed, or river basin level."

Dumler, along with irrigation engineers Norm Klocke and Gary Clark, and soil scientist Loyd Stone, developed the computer program.

Designed for areas of western Kansas receiving 11 to 21 inches of precipitation annually, CWA can be customized to reflect the well capacity and expected precipitation for the land being analyzed. Similarly, producers can rely on default crop production costs and commodity prices or enter values that match their own experience.

The main benefit of CWA, said Dumler, is its ability to sort through thousands of possible solutions to complex irrigated cropping options and find the best ones in terms of economic returns. As a seasonal planning tool, CWA estimates the net return from all the combinations of crops, irrigation amounts, precipitation amounts, production costs, commodity prices, and land allocations that the program user wants to examine.

"This can be especially valuable in today's environment of high energy prices and declining water levels," Dumler said.

The Crop Water Allocator can be downloaded at www.oznet.ksu.edu/mil .