How OpenAg Splits Data Between Irrigated and Nonirrigated Lands

By default, OpenAg uses the input data for each region to determine what data goes into the irrigated land model and what data goes into the nonirrigated land model. The input data contain values for the irrigated acreage and the nonirrigated acreage for each crop within each region.

If either irrigated or nonirrigated acreage is small for a crop in a region, then the model changes its behavior in order to avoid the effects of optimizing small values, which could produce incorrect results. Before splitting data between the irrigated and nonirrigated models, the application checks the irrigated and nonirrigated acreages for each crop to make sure that they are more than 5% of the total value for the crop. If the nonirrigated acreage is less than 5% of the total within the region, it will merge the acreage for the nonirrigated acreage with the irrigated acreage and run it through the PMP model. Similarly, if the irrigated acreage is less than 5% of the total acreage for the crop in the region, it will merge the irrigated acreage into the nonirrigaged acreage and run it through the regression model.

For example if we had the following crops and acreages in a region, we would send the outputs as shown in the table

Table 1 Example Crop Acreage in a Single Region

Crop	Irrigated Acreage	Nonirrigated Acreage	Acreage sent to PMP model	Acreage sent to Regression model
Corn	80 acres	20 acres	80 acres	20 acres
Grain	4 acres	96 acres	0 acres	100 acres
Beans	97.5 acres	2.5 acres	100 acres	0 acres

So, a crop like corn, which has a split of acres at 80% irrigated and 20% nonirrigated is sent to the models exactly as the inputs provide, with 80 acres used in the PMP model and 20 acres used in the regression model. But the other two crops in the region are modified slightly. Grain, with 96 nonirrigated acres and 4 irrigated acres has all 100 acres sent to the nonirrigated regression model. Beans see the reverse, with 97.5 acres of irrigated land and 2.5 acres of nonirrigated land, it sees all 100 acres of its cropped area sent to the irrigated PMP model. These numbers add up to 100 for ease of percentages, but in reality, the area for each crop within a region would not match between crops.

These calculations are conducted for each crop and each region, so even though all grain acreage is sent to the regression model for this example region, in other regions it may still use the PMP model or a combination of the PMP and regression models, based on the acreages for each specific region.