households received the Agriculture Questionnaire, which solicited plot-level information on land areas, manager/holder identification, labor and non-labor input use, and crop cultivation and production.<sup>3</sup> Further, agricultural production data were collected for the two main agricultural seasons in each survey. Handheld global positioning system (GPS)-based locations and land areas of the plots were recorded, permitting us to link household- and plot-level data to outside geographic information system (GIS) databases.

The IHS3 required GPS-based area measurement of all plots that are owned and/or cultivated by the sampled households, within 2 hours of travel with respect to the household location, regardless of mode of transportation. For the distant plots, the field teams were advised to cluster them in accordance with their location, and to visit them in a coordinated fashion by using the team vehicle. For the sub-sample of IHS3 households that were visited twice, the first visit data were also reviewed, and the missing GPS-based plot areas were fed forward to the second visit interviews for potential capture by the field teams. While the first visit constraints leading to missing data still applied to most of these households during the second visit, the continuing emphasis on increasing the volume of GPS-based plot area measures did result in additional data capture. On the other hand, the ESS2 instructed the enumerators to take GPS-based area measures of all plots that are owned and/or cultivated by the sampled households, irrespective of distance. For plots less than 40 square meters, the enumerators measured areas by traversing, instead of GPS units. The overall rates of missingness in GPS-based plot areas were considerably low in both settings: 3.8 percent in Malawi and 6.2 percent in Ethiopia. These are in fact the lowest levels observed among the surveys supported by the LSMS-ISA program.

> 3 Both the IHS3 and the ESS2 make a clear distinction between a _parcel_ and a _plot_ . A parcel is conceptualized as a continuous piece of land under a common tenure system, while a plot is defined as a continuous piece of land on which a unique crop or a mixture of crops is grown, under a uniform, consistent crop management system, not split by a path of more than one meter in width, and with boundaries defined in accordance with the crops grown and the operator. Therefore, a parcel can be made up of one or more plots. This distinction is key since for the purposes of within-farm analysis of agricultural productivity, the ideal is to capture within-parcel, plot area measurements linked with plotlevel measurement of agricultural production Parcel-level GPS-based area measurement, on the other hand, could serve other objectives, such as surveying of land for land registration or titling programs or for land ownership measurement. An open empirical question is whether the extent to which parcel-area measurement could be reliably backed from aggregation of within-parcel, plot area measures – an exercise that will be mediated by the precision with which parcel and plot boundaries are established in the field prior to GPS-based area measurement.

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