A central source of farming information

rice

farmer

and

The Farm Household Survey Database (FHS) is a collection of

farm-level datasets on rice productivity, fertilizer and pesticide use, labor inputs, prices, income, demographics, farm characteristics, and other related data on rice production in farmers fields. It includes many variables that describe not only rice production in actual farmers fields but also farmers and farm families. It is a rich collection of actual farm and household level data collected through personal interviews, farm record keeping, and periodic monitoring of farm activities from various sites in different rice-growing countries of Asia.

Filling up the box

Information is gathered through surveys conducted by a reputable pool of researchers and enumerators. Surveys have been conducted since the 1970s under different projects with distinct objectives. This comprises the major complexity of this endeavor.

Delivering the box worldwide

The fastest way to share information today is through the internet and as the World Wide Web becomes accessible to a wider range of users, ease of use is very important. The FHS web application is an interactive utility for browsing and retrieving farm-level rice production data that were not easily accessible before. Users may search for data from three entry-points depending on the perceived priority or focus -- i.e. by location, project, or table/variable.

Consultations with researchers and data management experts were conducted to standardize variables, codes, formats, etc. The output is a template to be used for encoding.

The FHS home page showing the introduction, charts, onsite pictures, and featured project.

Fitting existing records to the standard could be a grueling task as they may have been stored in a totally different format. Furthermore, some records are stored in processed form and not as raw information.

Accomplished datasets are uploaded to the MySQL Server using R scripts. These R scripts also perform standardization tasks that can be automated. A final processing using MySQL scripts computes for some highdemand data (e.g., NPK, cost and return, etc.) as part of the end product.

Search by location lists countries with available household data. For a more sitespecific search, one can click on the map pins.

Project profile shows a backgrounder of the study -- i.e. purpose, year(s) of study, sample size, researchers, and a map of the study sites.

The components that built the box

Microsoft Excel Worksheets Template A spreadsheet template distributed to researchers and data encoders to ensure that the data to be submitted follow the format agreed upon. R a programming language and environment used to upload and perform additional standardization tasks. MySQL Database Server an open-source database management system that holds all the standardized datasets. FHS Web Application an internet browser-based facility to serve as a data retrieval tool.

Available rice farming data include assets, income sources, land information, inputs and their cost, and disposal and returns. Downloaded data are saved as comma-separated values (csv) for compatibility with different data analysis tools such as MS Excel, SPSS, SAS, and R.

Variables, countries, and years that may not be of interest to the user may be filtered out from the table using the list boxes.

http://ricestat.irri.org:8080/households
RESEARCH DATABASE MANAGEMENT GROUP SOCIAL SCIENCES DIVISION