TheImprovement ofTropical and Subtropical Rangelands

70 IMPROVEMENT OF TROPICAL AND SUBTROPICAL RANGELANDS
technical specialists who must make judgments about the productivity
of resources in new projects. The preliminary experiments do
not yield perfect or reproducible results, parlicularly when applied
to international projects of an agricultural nature where factors such
as weather, variability in inputs, and the performance of the field
crew typically are incompletely controlled. Situations in developing
countries lead to what might be called ~e experimental gap"
between the yields that are obtained on the experimental plots and
those likely to be achieved on projects. The technical specialists mUBt
attempt to estimate the extent of experimental gap and the extent
of adjustment or correction. Farming systems research is attempting
to narrow this gap.
In general, local data are moet useful for ucertaining the response
to different treatments or the change in output resulting from
a change in level of the inputs.
Farmers or pastoralists may be the best source ofinformation on
crop or vegetation and animal performance, requirements for labor,
materials, machinery Ule, feed requirements, and so on. Information
collected locally by survey procedures can be used to establish benchmarks
for current enterprise combinations and production practices,
and to obtain crop and livestock labor requirements and machine use
levels for operations of different sizes.
MARUT PRICE DETERMINATION
A number of problems confound the establishment of prices for
use in project planning. Obtaining satisfactory price information
is usually not a difficult problem in the United States. Merchants,
dealers, and farm operators can usually provide satisfactory information
on current levels of prices paid and received and wage rates.
In developing countries, however, specific price information may be
more difficult to obtain, and short-term price fluctuations are likely.
To the extent that markets exist and market price information
is available, market prices should be used, but a few caveats must
be considered. First, if market prices are generated from a location
remote from the project area, then it would be necessary to make
adjustments to account for differences from the project area because
of transportation costs, any 108le8 due to waste, spoilage, shrinkage,
or death loss, and for transaction costs at the marketplace.
H prices tend to fluctuate in a completely irregular or random