Abstract
The subject of whole farm budgeting can be tedious for both teacher and student because emphasis is necessarily placed on the separate components of a budget, often losing sight of their interrelationships and leaving little lime to use the budget. This paper describes a CAL module developed to address this situation by a group of UK farm management lecturers and a development team supported by central Government funding. BUDGET BUILDER is a spreadsheet- based whole farm budgeting tool which, with a linked tutorial component, leads the student through the construction of a whole farm budgeting model beginning with simple enterprise gross margins and fixed cost budgets and culminating in projected cash fow, profit and balance sheet statements.
Both the tutorial and the model are structured to permit different levels of both entry and exit to accommodate students from different academic backgrounds and at different stages in their courses.