A users guide to FASAP - A Fortran program for the analysis of farm survey data

Abstract

In cooperation with researchers in Many national agricultural research programs, CIMMYT has sought to develop procedures which help to focus agricultural research squarely on the needs of farmers. The process involves collaboration of biological scientists and economists to identify the groups of farmers for whom technologies are to be developed, determining their circumstances and problems, screening this information for research opportunities, and then implementing the resulting research programs on experiment stations and on the fields of representative farmers. The present paper documents a computer program FASAP for the analysis of farm survey data. It has been developed to fill a gap in Many national programs where economists have access to computers but lack the standard software programs such as SAS and SPSS with which to analyse farm survey data. FASAP, a small program written in FORTRAN should be readily adapted to these computers and enable Most of the basic calculations, tabulations and frequencies from a one-contact farm survey to be performed following the objectives and methods of farm survey data analysis discussed in our Manual "Planning Technologies Appropriate to Farmers: Concepts and Procedures". This program was developed originally from TABL a program written by F.B. Lauckner for the Biometrics Library at the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute, Trinidad, West Indies. We are grateful to them for allowing us to use their program as a base. Corrections were made by James Draper of the Data Processing Service at CIMMYT. The adaptation to the IBM 370 was made by Luis E. Ochoa Valenzuela of the Statistics and Computer Center of the Postgraduate College in Chapingo. The program can be punched directly from the listing provided in Appendix A, or preferably a complete card deck for either an IBM 370 version of the program or a Data General Nova 3 version can be requested from CIMMYT's Economics Program. We encourage users to send us their comments on problems in implementing the program and especially any improvements that they might make in the current program.