Compare methods

	Land Equivalent Ratio	Gross Margin Analysis
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1980	1979
Originator	Roger Mead & Roger W. Willey	C. S. Barnard & J. S. Nix (farm planning tradition)
Type	Descriptive index of relative land productivity	Enterprise margin pipeline (output minus variable costs)
Seminal source	Mead, R., & Willey, R. W. (1980). The Concept of a 'Land Equivalent Ratio' and Advantages in Yields from Intercropping. Experimental Agriculture, 16(3), 217-228.	Barnard, C. S., & Nix, J. S. (1979). Farm Planning and Control (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9780521296045
Aliases	LER, Relative Yield Total, Land Equivalent Coefficient, Intercropping Land-Use Efficiency	Enterprise Gross Margin, Gross Margin Budgeting, Contribution Margin Analysis (Farm), Variable-Cost Margin Analysis
Related	4	3
Summary	The land equivalent ratio (LER) is the standard index for judging whether intercropping — growing two or more crops together on the same land — uses land more efficiently than growing each crop separately. Formalized by Roger Mead and Roger Willey in 1980, the LER expresses how much land would be required under sole cropping to produce the yields achieved by one unit of intercropped land. It is computed by dividing each component crop's intercrop yield by its sole-crop yield and summing these partial ratios across all components. An LER greater than one means the intercrop is more land-efficient than the corresponding sole crops, and the amount above one quantifies the land saved, giving agronomists a simple, interpretable, and widely used measure of the biological advantage of mixed cropping.	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.