It was seen in Chapter 1 that the planning of the use of farm resources breaks down into the twin problems of discovering the best way of organising individual enterprises and the best way of fitting them together into an overall farming system. The first requires the farmer to look inwards at his enterprises in order to decide the methods and techniques to adopt in running them. The second requires him to look outward from them, to see how they compete against or complement one another in their use of scarce resources. Although this part of the book concentrates on enterprise organisation, it does not imply that the two sides of planning can be divorced from one another, for both are closely linked aspects of the same general problem and must, in practice, be considered together.

Enterprise organisation and fixed resources

Before proceeding further, it is pertinent to consider what is meant by an 'enterprise'. In the commonly accepted sense, enterprises are distinguished from one another by virtue of their different end-products: for example, barley as opposed to sugar beet, or table poultry as opposed to eggs. This may not, however, always suffice in the context of economic planning, where the distinction between enterprises rests on their giving different returns to fixed resources. The first part of Table 6.1 demonstrates that in this sense barley and sugar beet are, indeed, distinct enterprises, as they give different returns to land and autumn labour.