A USERS ANUAL FOR THE FARM SYSTEMS LAB
 CROP BUDGET GENERATOR

 Bryan E. Melton

 INTRODUCTION

 The Florida Agricultural and Resource Management Systems Laboratory,

or more simply, "The FARM Systems Lab," is an integral component of the

Food and Resource Economics Department (FRED) of the University of Florida.

Its purpose is to provide for the collection and analysis of a wide range

of information relevant to agricultural management and resource use in

Florida. As such, the FARM Systems Lab serves as a valuable research and

education resource--designed not only to aid individual decision-makers,

but also to facilitate analyses of the many private and public policy

alternatives facing modern agriculture.

 One important aspect of such a program is the ability to develop, or

generate, budgets for the many commodities, management systems and resource

situations found in Florida. The resulting budgets must then not only be

internally consistent in their specification, but must also be easily

modified to reflect the changing price, policy and technical conditions

that have dominated agriculture in recent years. To accomplish this, a

computerized enterprise budget generator program was acquired from Okla-

homa State University in 1979, and subsequently modified for Florida's

particular conditions. This report describes the use of that program in

the generation of crop budgets through the FARM Systems Lab.1


 Bryan E. Melton is an assistant professor in the Food and Resource
Economics Department and an adjunct assistant professor in the Animal
Science Department, University of Florida, Gainesville.

 Because the program reported herein is based on the Oklahoma State
Budget. Generator Program, this report draws heavily from similar reports
produced by Oklahoma State University [2,3].