Abstract
Linear programming is used to create farm planning or regional farming patterns or to evaluate the managerial impact of an agricultural technique. There are many commercial or free linear programming tools for use on a personal computer. An experienced user can easily utilize such programs if they are familiar with building linear programing models. But the user needs to master the translation of managerial conditions and farming techniques into a farm planning model. It would therefore encourage the spread of linear programming to provide a tool with which a user could automatically build models without in-depth experience. The program "BFM" reported in this article has been developed as such a program and its primary goal is "making farm plans quickly." BFM has the following important characteristics; firstly the number of settings related to farming conditions is restricted to the minimum necessary for model building, secondly the entering and modifying of managerial indices is simple, and thirdly various types of farm planning model in which the kind of farmland differs can be processed. The basic function of BFM is to build a farm planning model in which the relations between supplied quantity and required quantity in farmland and farm labor are described as constraint equations. In summary, BFM is a useful program which helps a user to build a farm planning model easily and rapidly. BFM can be downloaded from the following URLs: http://39you.net/xlp/bfm.html or http://cse.naro.affrc.go.jp/ooisi/bfm.html.
