Measurements of Productivity Differences in Forage Production for a Basis of the Development of Farm Diagnosis Expert System

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This study was designed to develop and liiustrate methods for measuring and evaluating individual productivity efficiency which would be a tool of " problem finding" part and a principal component of farm diagnosis expert system. Since individual farm manager must recognize comparative productivity of his farming and the causes of difference in an effort of setting-up his strategies for continuous growth of the farm, framework for productivity evaluation must be developed as an essential part of compouter aided farm diagnosis system.We could not completed in developing an expert system for finding the causes of low productivity at individual farm level which would be available for practical use though, we successfully obtained methods of measuring comparative productivity of each farm and identified the causing factors based on statistically estimated production functions. Forage production was chosen to illustrate this methods.According to our case studies in forage production in Hokkaide, one of primal causes of this was farming size. All farms realizing high productivity are found among large scale farms which showed increasing return to scale, while most farms showed constant return to scale. Secondly, highly mechanized farms are not alwas identified as high productivity farms. Equally important was that variable inputs such as fertilizer must be used in a proper combination each other.It is our conclusion that our methods of measuring productivity difference among farms are able to incorporate to built effective expert system aiming to find problems and to form strategies for the improvement of productivity at individual farm base.