Reviewing his project on agrarian change in rice-growing areas undergoing the earlier stages of a Green Revolution, B.H. Farmer concluded:

This chapter, unlike most of the work that Benny Farmer has inspired, does not result from the author's own ‘prolonged work in the villages and paddy fields’, but it does draw upon other people's data from detailed field studies that are entirely within the Farmer tradition. My objective is to explore a methodology for the comparative analysis of agricultural systems. This methodology was developed by agriculturalists and social scientists in response to the ‘energy crisis’, following the oil shortages and oil price fluctuations of the 1970s which were seen as threatening the whole basis of modern technology, including that of the Green Revolution (e.g. Makhijani & Poole, 1975; Leach, 1976; Pimentel & Pimentel, 1979; Pimentel, 1980; Bayliss- Smith, 1982a).

To discover the degree of dependence of an agricultural system upon new technology an analysis is required of energy flows within the system. Given the variability in peasant farming practice that Farmer refers to above, data on energy flows become meaningless unless they refer to a particular farming environment. We are therefore drawn towards the micro-scale of enquiry, towards particular villages, and within these villages to consider particular households. Such data are available for the Mandya district of Karnataka State, India, an area which was studied by the economic anthropologist T.