Comprehensive Economic and Environmental Optimization Tool (CEEOT)

CEEOT is an integrated suite of economic and environmental models designed to simulate economic and environmental impacts of policy alternatives, individual practices, and combinations of management practices. CEEOT was initially developed in 1995 at TIAER as part of a National Pilot Project (NPP) funded by the USEPA. Under the NPP initiative, CEEOT was applied to the dairy industry in the upper North Bosque River watershed (Osei et al., 2003a; Osei et al., 2000b; Pratt et al., 1997; Saleh et al., 2000) and the Lake Fork Reservoir watershed in eastern Texas (Osei et al., 2003b; McNitt et al., 1999). In subsequent years, the CEEOT modeling system was applied to the Upper Maquoketa River watershed in northeast Iowa—a region with dairy operations but also beef cattle, swine, and mixed operations (Keith et al., 2000); and to the Duck Creek watershed—a central Texas region experiencing rapid growth of broiler operations (Keplinger and Abraham, 2002). In the upper North Bosque River watershed study, the CEEOT modeling system was also applied to several dairy management practices that were considered and subsequently included in the total maximum daily load (TMDL) implementation plan for the North Bosque River (Keplinger, 2003; TCEQ and TSSWCB, 2002).

CEEOT currently incorporates the following environmental and economic models: 1) the SWAPP
program: the fully linked SWAT/APEX program with dynamic fertilizer management capabilities, and 2)
the Farm-level Economic Model (FEM), a comprehensive farm-level economic model also developed at
TIAER that combines simulation, optimization, and accounting features to estimate the economic
impacts of scenarios on representative agricultural operations. A brief discussion of APEX, SWAT, and
FEM is given here.