Agricultural & Food Sciences

Marginal product is the additional output generated by adding one more unit of a variable input, such as labour or fertiliser, while every other input is held constant. The practical question it answers: is the next worker, the next bag of fertiliser, or the next hour of irrigation actually worth adding? Marginal product is the

Total factor productivity (TFP) is the portion of output growth that cannot be explained by growth in the combined inputs used to produce it — land, labour, capital and materials — and is generally attributed to technology, genetics and management improvements. The question TFP answers: is a farm, region or country genuinely getting more efficient,

Agricultural productivity measures the amount of farm output produced relative to the inputs used to produce it — land, labour, capital and materials — and rises whenever more output is obtained from the same or fewer inputs. The practical question it answers: is the same field, the same worker, or the same herd producing more

A production function is a mathematical or graphical statement of the maximum quantity of output that can be produced from every possible combination of inputs, given the current state of technology. Put simply: it is the rulebook that translates land, labour, capital and materials into how much a farm, factory or economy can actually produce.

Farm management is the process of making and carrying out the business decisions that organize a farm’s land, labour and capital to achieve the operator’s objectives, usually maximum profit, under conditions of risk and scarce resources. In plain terms: farming is the physical activity of growing crops and raising animals; farm management is the thinking

Capital is the stock of produced assets — machinery, buildings, irrigation works, breeding livestock, established orchards and stored inputs — that is used to produce further output rather than consumed directly. It is everything a farm has built up or bought in order to make next season’s production possible. Capital is the third of the Factors

Labour is the human effort, physical and mental, applied to production — the second of the classical factors, and in agriculture the one most often supplied by the household rather than bought in a market. The question it raises on every farm is: who actually does the work, and what is their time worth? Labour

In economics, land means all natural resources used in production — the soil itself, together with water, climate, minerals, sunlight and the biological capacity of the site. It is, in short, the part of the farm that nobody manufactured. Land is the first of the Factors of Production, and the one whose supply is closest to

The factors of production are the basic categories of resources used to produce goods and services: land, labour, capital and entrepreneurship. The question they answer is a simple one: what does a farm need to have before it can grow anything at all? They are the inputs that sit on the input side of a Production

Scarcity is the basic economic condition in which the resources available to a society are limited while the wants those resources could satisfy are effectively unlimited. Put plainly: there is never enough land, water, labour, time or money to do everything a farmer or a government would like to do, so something always has to