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Glossary

Baysian model: A decision analysis based on the probabilities of experience, which can be revised as additional data becomes available. Reliable information on past production can provide a basis for a calculated yield indicator to estimate crop yields.

Calculated yield indicator: A predictor model, calculated from unbiased statistics, on which to determine the estimated range of crop yields against actual production. An important management aid when monitoring yield distortions in contract farming projects.

Contracted farmer: Any farmer who has made an agreement to grow a specific crop, or crops, for a buyer.

Cultural practices: Crop husbandry practices that include soil cultivation, sowing, transplanting, weed and pest control, and harvesting.

Directed smallholder farming: Where small-scale farmers are managed or organized by farmer cooperatives, government bodies, commodity agencies or the private sector. Directed contract farming requires a high level of management involvement in the farmer's production.

Extension staff: Employees of the sponsor who directly interact with farmers on all agronomic and administrative matters related to the contracted crop; sometimes called field officers or technicians.

Extra-contractual marketing: Selling or buying produce outside the conditions of a contract.

Intercropping: The interrow cultivation of two crops simultaneously in the same field.

Monoculture: The planting, cultivation and harvesting of a single crop in one season.

Monte Carlo simulation method: A simulation procedure used for farm planning.

Multipartite: A number of sponsors having joint ownership and responsibilities within a single project.

Multiple cropping (or multicropping): The growing of more than one crop on a single farm. Multiple cropping can comprise a series of activities that include relay planting and intercropping.

Parastatal: Statutory government organization. Sometimes known as a quasi-government agency or body.

Physical determinants: The significant characteristics of soil, climate and topography that influence crop production.

Plasma: In Indonesia, subcontracting of crops by a larger-scale farmer who then sells to a sponsor-processor.

Production matrix: A blueprint of important components in an agricultural development on which to benchmark significance, responsibility and achievement.

Project: Set of activities and organization, normally in a defined area, to develop agricultural production for economic reasons. The term is applied in this publication to refer to the total operation that grows a specific crop or a number of crops under contract farming arrangements.

Relay planting: Planting a rotating crop as seedlings together with another crop before the first crop is harvested.

Sharecropping (or share-farming): A farming system where a landowner normally provides the land and capital and the sharecropper provides the labour. The manner in which the produce is divided varies but normally the landowner receives a predetermined proportion of the crop either in cash or kind. A rudimentary form of contract farming.

Sponsors: In the context of this publication, sponsors are identified as individual entrepreneurs, multinationals, small private sector companies, parastatal agencies or farmer cooperatives.

Subsistence agriculture: A cropping system where farm production of the land is predominately consumed by the farmer and his extended family.

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