FARMER PARTICIPATION FOR MORE EFFECTIVE RESEARCH IN SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE
If developing countries are to meet national food needs and alleviate rural poverty,
millions of small farmers must become active participants in the agricultural
research and development process (Whyte and Boynton, 1983).
Most crops and many predominant agricultural production systems are the result of
empirical research, or trial and error, by generations of farmers working the land. Neolithic farmers knew much about 1500 different plant species used for food and. medicine. (Braidwood, 1967). Vestiges of their traditional subsistence systems still exist in many regions (Francis, 1 986b). With the advent of scientifically based agriculture following World War 11, however, farmers' influence on technology development became less and less.
In the late 1 960s and early 1 970s, the international development community began to see a need to reach the many small, resource-poor farmers who were being by-passed by the Green Revolution. Whyte and Boynton (1983) argued that this meant 1) an increased emphasis upon onfarm research, 2) greater interdisciplinary collaboration, 3) agricultural bureaucracies that are more responsive to the interests and needs of small farmers, and 4) small farmers should no longer be treated simply as passive recipients of what the experts decide is good for them.
To respond to this new clientele, a methodology was needed to efficiently find
environment-specific technologies for large numbers of such farmers. This methodology had to not only reach farmers in widely varying and often difficult situations who lack the resources required to dominate, the environment., but also:
- speed up the technology development, evaluation, delivery and adoption process,
and
- efficiently use scarce institutional resources (those human, physical, and financial
resources of national agricultural research and extension services in developing
countries.
In order to accomplish these needs, the methodology required an integrated, multidisciplinary approach that incorporated farmers, researchers and extension personnel.
Internationally, over the last 20 years, this *real world* or on-farm research for large
numbers of farmers has come to be called Farming Systems Research and Extension (FSRE). In the broadest sense FSRE involves
- rapid diagnosis of farm problems by multidisciplinary teams to provide the basis for
- adaptive and descriptive biophysical on-farm research which is supported by
- socioeconomic research on-farm and in the farm community,
- controlled biophysical research in laboratories and on-station, and
- simultaneous dissemination and diffusion of results.
By incorporating farmers from the beginning of technology development from problem diagnosis, through adaptation and evaluation FSRE 'Methodology reduces the incidence of-