Partial Budgets & Cost-Benefit Analysis

This lesson is aimed to help farmers in the cohort make decisions about which soil health practices to prioritize based on lab results, soil health goals and simple cost-benefit analysis. This lesson includes a recorded presentation, downloadable spreadsheets for doing your own cost-benefit analysis for the following practices: cover cropping systems, carbon amendments and windbreaks. Links to additional guides and presentations are also included to help those who want to dive more deeply into doing cost-benefit analysis and partial budgets.

Decision-making:

• Prioritization based on lab results and soil health goals
• Prioritization based on costs vs. benefits
• Order of operation- What practices should be done first, which should be done together and which will need to wait until next season?
• Feedback – How do you make decisions about which practices to prioritize?

Partial Budgets & Cost-Benefit Analysis

• A simple framework for doing a cost-benefit analysis
• How to calculate the cost-savings from cover crops, carbon amendments and windbreaks.
  • What costs categories to use for cover crops, carbon amendments and windbreaks. 
  • Examples of cost-benefit analysis completed with fellow-farmers in this cohort. 
• Partial budget- What is it and how can you create one?
  • Examples of partial budgets 
  • A simple framework for doing a partial budget
  • Additional resource for developing your partial budget & case study examples