Compare methods

	Enterprise Budgeting	Agricultural Household Model	Gross Margin Analysis	Partial Budget Analysis
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Regression model	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1984	1986	1979	1988
Originator	Farm management tradition (Kay, Edwards & Duffy; Boehlje & Eidman)	Inderjit Singh, Lyn Squire & John Strauss	C. S. Barnard & J. S. Nix (farm planning tradition)	CIMMYT Economics Program
Type	Full-cost enterprise budgeting pipeline with per-unit cost of production	Structural production-consumption household model with separability testing	Enterprise margin pipeline (output minus variable costs)	Marginal partial-budgeting pipeline for a single farm change
Seminal source	Kay, R. D., Edwards, W. M., & Duffy, P. A. (2020). Farm Management (9th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Education. ISBN: 9781259837463	Singh, I., Squire, L., & Strauss, J. (Eds.). (1986). Agricultural Household Models: Extensions, Applications, and Policy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press for the World Bank. ISBN: 9780801932489	Barnard, C. S., & Nix, J. S. (1979). Farm Planning and Control (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9780521296045	CIMMYT Economics Program. (1988). From Agronomic Data to Farmer Recommendations: An Economics Training Manual (Completely Revised Edition). Mexico, D.F.: International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). ISBN: 9789686127188
Aliases	Enterprise Budget, Crop and Livestock Budget, Cost of Production Budget, Full-Cost Enterprise Analysis	Farm Household Model, Singh-Squire-Strauss Model, Non-Separable Household Model, Agricultural Household Production-Consumption Model	Enterprise Gross Margin, Gross Margin Budgeting, Contribution Margin Analysis (Farm), Variable-Cost Margin Analysis	Partial Budgeting, Farm Partial Budget, Marginal Budget Analysis, CIMMYT Partial Budget
Related	3	3	3	3
Summary	An enterprise budget is a complete, per-unit projection of the revenues and costs of a single farm enterprise — a crop per hectare, a class of livestock per head — that, unlike a gross margin, accounts for both variable and fixed costs to arrive at net return and the full cost of production. Standard in farm management texts such as Kay, Edwards, and Duffy and Boehlje and Eidman, enterprise budgeting forces every claim on the enterprise's resources to be priced: not just seed and fertiliser, but depreciation, interest, land charge, and overhead. The headline outputs are net return per unit and the unit cost of production, the break-even price and yield that tell a manager what it really takes for the enterprise to pay its way.	The agricultural household model treats the farm household as a single unit that is simultaneously a producer and a consumer, choosing how much to grow, how much labour to hire or supply, and how much to consume — decisions that ordinary firm theory and consumer theory treat as separate. Synthesised in Singh, Squire, and Strauss's 1986 World Bank volume, the model's central result is conditional: when all markets (especially for labour) function perfectly, the household's problem is recursive — it maximises farm profit first and then spends that profit like any consumer, so production decisions are independent of preferences. But when markets fail, the two sides fuse: a shadow wage replaces the market wage and household composition begins to drive production. Whether that separation holds is an empirical question, and Benjamin's 1992 Econometrica test is the canonical way to answer it.	Gross margin analysis is the workhorse of farm management planning: for each enterprise on a farm it computes the gross margin — gross output minus the variable costs directly attributable to that enterprise — usually expressed per hectare, per head, or per activity unit. Rooted in the British farm-planning tradition of Barnard and Nix and a fixture of standard farm management texts, the gross margin deliberately stops short of fixed and overhead costs. That makes it the natural currency for comparing enterprises and planning the farm: because fixed costs are largely common to all enterprises in the short run, ranking and combining enterprises by their gross margins per unit of the scarce resource is the quickest route to a more profitable farm plan.	Partial budget analysis is a marginal method of farm management economics that evaluates the profitability of a single, well-defined change to a farm plan — adopting a new variety, adding an irrigation, switching a feed ration — without rebuilding the whole-farm budget. Codified for agronomic recommendation work in the CIMMYT Economics Program's 1988 manual From Agronomic Data to Farmer Recommendations, it rests on a simple insight: only the costs and revenues that actually change need to be counted. The analyst arranges those changes into four cells — added revenue and reduced costs on the positive side, reduced revenue and added costs on the negative side — and the net of the two columns is the change in profit attributable to the change alone.