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NUMBERS OF COLLABORATORS
COLLABORATION: MEANING AND BENEFITS
FOR FARMING SYSTEMS APPROACHES
Collaboration between farm families, research scientists and extension agents is critical to the success of farming systems approaches. involving each of these actors in the process of Identifying problems, searching for alternatives, testing and evaluating technology, and disseminating it theoretically achieves two things. They are 1) problems are identified with greater clarity and relevancy to actual farm conditions, and 2) more acceptable (to the farm unit) solutions are reached. Additionally, better cost efficiency is achieved through speeding up the process, including learning on the part of the clientele.
Working with farmers and scientists from other disciplines provides farming systems teams/with a mechanism for rapidly generating and assessing information, and an arena for critically proposing and reviewing research strategies.
Achievement of collaboration must proceed on two levels. At the institutional level in the U.S., extension and research must be linked to address common problems. Resources must be shared across both domains in order to gain legitimization and the most efficient management of time, labor and information. Administrative support is crucial for obtaining funding at the state and national levels, and for politically justifying the approach. Ideally, extension agents and research scientist support should be sought from the start, and incorporated into annual planning and review sessions.. Despite initial difficulties in linking extension and research to FSR/E, this is how the project proceeds at Florida.
The second level involves farm-unit support, and is
achieved by working directly with farm unit members who are the clientele. incorporating these members builds trust, furthers learning and enhances- adoption of new technologies.
Florida's project additionally benefitted from U.S.D.A. support and a political climate in Florida which had drawn attention to the needs of smaller scale, family farmers.
INSTITUTIONAL COLLABORATORS
When the TSR/E project began its work in 1981, it relied upon a core group of 2 full-time IFAS appointed faculty and 2 individuals on U.S.D.A. funds. The core members were Dr. Peter Hilderbrand, an agricultural economist and former member of the