- 24 -


based upon oast experience or personal knowledge, and (b) those future events

to which he can not assign probabilities or where the probabilities offered are

not those derived from his personal experience and which are based upon external

knowledge provided by others. Both can be said to have probabilities, but the

distinction being drawn is based upon the source of the estimates. In the former

case it is the farmer himself; in the latter, it is usually an outside agent.
 who uses traditional techniques
 SThe peasant farmer/has a set of customary probabilities regarding the out-

 domes of his farming decisions which are based upon his own past experience and

 that of his forebears. The farming practices, the technologies applied to his

 production,havesignificant and predictable consequences not only for any given

 year but on the average among several years. The proof of his skill in determin-

 ing these probabilities is the simple fact of his family's survival generation

 after generation.

 Even the most illiterate peasant farmer has a knowledge of the probabilities

 which attach to his current, traditional practices. His current practices have

 both a risk and an uncertainty dimension which relate to three major sources of

 year to year variability in output:

 First, the farmer faces yield variability. The acreage which he plants to

 a given crop may be the concrete summation of his estimate of a variety of forces,

 but the actual yield obtained is not solely dependent upon acreage but a whole

 host of intervening factors between planting and harvest -- some subject to the

 control of the farmer; others, in the laps of the Gods. Actual field or barn

 yields obtained are a function of a wide range of variables -- sunshine, humidity,

 rainfall and even their incidence and timing during the cropping season; pests

 such as birds, rats, worms; blights, fungi and viruses; and even the unpredictable