Farm planning and enterprise selection have been studied by agricultural economists for many years. Detailed methodology has been developed to analyze the economic situation of farm firms and to project optimum combinations of resources used in producing selected enterprise activities. Programming techniques have been used extensively. They provided planning guidelines, with quality dependent on availability of data and completeness of the programming format.
One area of concern arising from many programming efforts is that resource utilization and, ultimately, enterprise selection do not accurately project the general patterns of production observed in a specific area. Furthermore, there is little observable indication that farmers tend to move toward the programming solution. This problem is apparent when more variable enterprises are programmed with traditionally less variable enterprises. The more variable enterprises are frequently indicated to be profitable in the programming solutions, but farmers are not very interested in growing them.