Web Work For Cost And Returns Estimates

History

The CARE site was started in 1996 as http://waterhome.tamu.edu/CARE. It was started for the dual purposes of supporting the NRCS CARE crop budgeting program, and distributing the 20,000 NRCS Crop Budgets developed by Verel Benson for the EQIP and HUMUS studies. It evolved into the major national site for all crop/livestock budgets produced by NRCS, universities, and the 50 state extension services. In 1999, it also became the host site for the AAEA Commodity Costs and Returns Estimation Handbook, referred to by many agricultural economics classes and all later crop and livestock budgeting models. The CARE site has 80% public usage and 20% NRCS usage, including direct links and support by the American Agricultural Economics Association, www.aaea.org, and many state universities and extension services.

Content

The most used content are the 50 state pages with links to the state extension services, Ag. Economics department, state Ag. Departments, NASS, NRCS, and NRCS economic information on each state website. Other information includes links to 100 budgeting estimation models, CARE/BUDGETS listserver, the NRCS CARE program, and the AAEA Commodity Costs and Returns Estimation Handbook containing the equations for all new budgeting models.

Future

Some of the content is getting out-of-date, but new materials are being maintained. There are several options for updating this site.

1. The site provides a good service by NRCS to the agricultural community, and continues to draw new economists into the site with the budgeting materials, and into an awareness of NRCS economics and eFOTG. NRCS could convert the site to the NRCS Look&Feel, and maintain the current data, primarily the inter-agency budgets by state. This site would be developed with a database to better select the hundreds of budgets linked on the site.
2. The site can be discontinued with the critical functions going to:
   1. The AAEA Commodity Costs and Returns Estimation Handbook can be placed directly on the AAEA.org site.
   2. The state-by-state information pages can be discontinued. They serve several useful purposes, but are not essential.
   3. The CARE listserver is already replaced by the BUDGET listserver, although I do seem to be the monitor of both.
   4. The CARE and other budgets actually hosted on the site can be moved to the new Economics site.
   5. The database function of budgets can be picked up by a different site. In May 2003, both the U of Minnesota, and Oklahoma State had developed new sites linking to budgets developed nationally. The University of California was collecting a list of specialty crops nationally. All three efforts were based on a one-time input of soft money, and no new entries were added to these three sites in the last seven months. The student programmers who built them have graduated, and it may take a fresh input of $$ to restart any of these university/extension sites.

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