Compare methods

	Partial Budget Analysis	Enterprise Budgeting	Gross Margin Analysis	Land Equivalent Ratio
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1988	1984	1979	1980
Originator	CIMMYT Economics Program	Farm management tradition (Kay, Edwards & Duffy; Boehlje & Eidman)	C. S. Barnard & J. S. Nix (farm planning tradition)	Roger Mead & Roger W. Willey
Type	Marginal partial-budgeting pipeline for a single farm change	Full-cost enterprise budgeting pipeline with per-unit cost of production	Enterprise margin pipeline (output minus variable costs)	Descriptive index of relative land productivity
Seminal source	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	Kay, R. D., Edwards, W. M., & Duffy, P. A. (2020). Farm Management (9th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Education. ISBN: 9781259837463	Barnard, C. S., & Nix, J. S. (1979). Farm Planning and Control (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9780521296045	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.
Aliases	Partial Budgeting, Farm Partial Budget, Marginal Budget Analysis, CIMMYT Partial Budget	Enterprise Budget, Crop and Livestock Budget, Cost of Production Budget, Full-Cost Enterprise Analysis	Enterprise Gross Margin, Gross Margin Budgeting, Contribution Margin Analysis (Farm), Variable-Cost Margin Analysis	LER, Relative Yield Total, Land Equivalent Coefficient, Intercropping Land-Use Efficiency
Related	3	3	3	4
Summary	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.	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.	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.	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.