PROJECT BACKGROUND In 1980, MAWD responded favorably to a request by the Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maiz y Trigo (CIMMYT) East and SouthAgricultural Institutions ern African economics program to demonstrate a set of procedures which
could improve the research program. CIMMYT's demonstration was part
Prior to the 1980s, the organizational structure of the Ministry of of a larger effort to engage in and introduce on-farm research (OFR) to
Agriculture and Water )evelopment (MAWD) in Zambia was characterized the region.1 CIMMYT undertook zoning and problem identification stages
by a top-down flow of information. Both research and extension services in Central Province. Following these demonstrations, MAWD decided to
were provided by the Department of Agriculture. However, each branch reorganize research so that commodity research teams would have a nahad its own substructure which operated independently. tional focus, and farming systems research and extension (FSR/E) an area
Until 1982, research was coordinated from the central research station focus.'This led to the formation of a new adaptive research planning team
Mt. Makulu in Lusaka :nd wa: arried out by the regional research sta- (ARPT) in each province, consisting of at least an economist and an tions and substations. The research was conducted by scientists working agronomist. A research extension liaison officer was assigned to each
on multidisciplinary commodity research teams, with agricultural assis- team. Their explicit objective was to work with subsistence and smalltants in the extension service. The commodities included cereals, tubers, scale commercial farmers in order to increase productivity and improve and oil seeds. There were 230 senior agricultural assistants and 604 agri- family welfare. An ARPT has been established in each of Zambia's nine cultural assistants in the extension service. Of the senior agricultural assis- provinces, each supported by a different donor(s). Since 1981, the United tants, 18 were women, and of the agricultural assistants, 23 were women. States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been working
The agricultural assistants introduced new technologies and information with CIMMYT and MAWD in Central Province.
primarily by selected on-farm demonstrations. The ARPT brought together social and natural scientists who examined
In 1981 the input supply and crop-monitoring functions were shifted the different farming systems in order to plan and undertake adaptive refrom the parastatal National Agricultural Marketing Board (NAMBOARD) search programs. The overall objective of the ARPT was to produce recomto the Central Province Cooperative Marketing Union (CPCMU). It was re- mendations relevant to the needs of Zambia's subsistence and small-scale
sponsible for the distribution and sale of inputs and the purchase of agri- commercial producers in the hope of improving the farmers' output and cultural produce at government-controlled prices. The Agricultural Fi- welfare. The ARPT used the following strategy to reach these objectives:
nance Company (AFC), a quasi-government company, was the major
source of credit for small farmers. 1. Collect information on the different farming systems in Zambia
which would be used to formulate relevant adaptive and applied
Formation of ARPT research programs.
In the 1970s a series of government and external evaluations found that the 2. Undertake adaptive research especially on farmers' fields.
research structure had problems producing recommendations which could 3. Improve the link between research and extension staff, through
be rapidly adopted by the majority of Zambia's subsistence and small-scale the program of on-farm trials.
commerical farmers. Realizing that almost 80 percent of the county's maize
production (which was the principal food and cash crop) was from small- 4. Make information available to relevant institutions, that is, those
scale commercial and traditional, or subsistence, farmers, MAWD officials dealing with extension, input supply, credit, marketing, etc., and
sought ways to make research of more relevance to small farmers. One assist them in preparing projects which would remove particular
strategy was to develop a standard unit of land measurement of appropriate institutional and infrastructural problems facing farmers in different
size for small farmers and make recommendations according to that unit. recommendation domains.
This led to the establishment of LIMA recommendations. A LIMA is approxiniately one-quarter of a hectare (seventy steps by seventy steps), and the The ARPT worked closely with the commodity research teams and
tern lina means "to cultivate" in most of the languages spoken in Zambia. the extension branch. Within this structure, the ARPT supplemented bioFertilizer, planting density, and other recommendations were developed per logical parameters used by the commodity research teams with socioeccLIMA for each province. The weakness of the program was that provincial nomic data to help shape the content of the applied research. The nawide recommendations still were not appropriate for all small farmers. tional FSR/E elfort was coordinated by an ARPT leader in L.usaka, who