Concluding Comments

To prepare farm budgets, policy analysts need complete familiarity with production systems. Arbitrary decisions are made at all stages of the research effort, from the selection of representative systems to decisions about normal levels of quantity and price. These judgments usually must be made without the comfort of statistical tests for representativeness. In these circumstances, time spent in fieldwork becomes essential for the development of budgets. The great attraction of the budget-based approach is the complementarity between secondary data and fieldwork, allowing field time to be measured in weeks instead of years. Even senior analysts are afforded the opportunity to view and understand production systems directly rather than having to interpret them through the eyes of enumerators or the vagaries of a massive data base. Such close association greatly enhances the potential for relevant policy analysis.