Farm Enterprise Analysis: Has It Lost Its Usefulness?

Abstract

Farm enterprise analysis is a term that has traditionally been used to describe the process of determining costs associated with farm business enterprises and enterprise profitability. A key challenge to those who would know their costs has been the lack of guidance on cost accounting principles and the application of those principles to agriculture. However, that recently changed with the publication of the Farm Financial Standards Council’s Management Accounting Principles for Agricultural Producers, which has led to questions about the usefulness of enterprise analysis. The differences between the two approaches to determining costs for farm business enterprises are discussed as they relate to the usefulness of the output to managers for decision making.Productivity Analysis,