General Resources

This page is intended to give you an idea on how to search for things in the Mexican literature and give you a head start. Keep in mind that you might search google with the english terms and say "Mexico" included in the search string or translate the words you are searching first into spanish and then search.

• Links to translation funcitions in google are found in the course website but you can also just go to "Google Translate".
  
  
• The site from INEGI (http://www.inegi.org.mx/default.aspx) from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography, is an excellent resource of data over various sectors of agriculture over time.

• Go to the INEGI site above, in the center is a Map of Mexico, click the English button
• Select any state in Mexico, then click the image of Chart on the right hand side.
• Click on more indicators (left hand side)
• Farming industry and forest use has some interesting statistics, select one, and update the chart
• At first you see births as the label for the y axis of the chart but it has an associated menu button, if you click on this you will see a menu option that corresponded to what you selected.
• In the upper right of the chart are 3 tabs that display the data in different ways and the slider at the bottom can give you different years and plots over the years as well.  Experiment with this and select different states to see what you can get.
• Another way to present the data is to use the Maps function that is located just below the Chart function.  You can get statistics displayed graphically for the entire country or just by an individual state.  Again just play around with this feature to look at how agriculture varies across mexico.

• The site from Sagarpa (https://www.gob.mx/sagarpa) is an excellent resource of publications from or indexed by the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Rural Development, Fisheries and Food.

• It may sound strange, but don’t use the English translation of the site provided by Sagarpa.  It does not include everything and is more of general set of documents.
• I have found that you should open a google translate page and type in words that you would use to search the site in English.  Get the Spanish translation and then copy and paste this into the search bar in the Sagarpa site.  You get links to documents and you can often guess what they are about but you can also copy the link titles and use Google to translate it for you.  For example I found that the words “dairy cattle reproduction” translate as “reproducción de ganado lechero”.  When this is pasted into and searched on the Sagarpa site, I got the first link as going to “Sistema de producción de leche en granjas bovinas familiars”.  This translates via google into “System of milk production in cattle farming family”.  Even though the English is not entirely correct, you can understand the link.
• You need to explore sites like this just as you would if it were in English
• Also navigation on the site is similar to any web page you have gone to in the past.  So for example, I guessed that “ir” is used to activate the search box.  The translation for “ir” is “go”.  I also guessed that “inicio” must mean something similar to “home” just from where it was located on the page.  It actually translates as “initiation” so you can see how it relates to home in most English web sites.