Overview

The Crop Livestock Enterprise Model (CLEM) is a whole-of-farm enterprise model that can test a range of farm improvement strategies in a multitude of crop and livestock systems while tracking impacts on finances, natural resources, and highly constrained resources such as labour. To achieve this, CLEM expands upon the approach at the core of its precursors, the Integrated Analysis Tool (IAT) and NABSA (Northern Australian Beef Systems Analyser) where available resources or farm assets (e.g. animals, crops, fodder, labour, land, money, water) are used by farm activities (e.g. grow crops, manage animals, feed animals, manage fodder, manage manure, feed household) to simulate a farming system.

The model is based upon decades of research in Australia and internationally by CSIRO other organisations much of which is published in the scientific literature. CLEM is provided as a stand-alone model within the APSIM Next Generation modelling environment and does not require any understanding of other APSIM models (e.g. crop models) or programming management scripts. The APSIM Next Generation software provides a contemporary modelling environment, user interface and the ability to dynamically interact with other APSIM models if required, all aimed to help use the CLEM model. The modular (object orientated) approach used to model CLEM provides a fully customisable and flexible set-up for the user allowing the range of scenarios from simple simulations to complex whole farm simulations to be performed. The model is designed for use by researchers with limited to no coding experience, but is also able to be expanded to address future research needs by experienced users.

See Background for more details