VII

 Farmer-Managed Trials


 Previous chapters have described a process by which
researchers evaluate technological alternatives over one
or more locations and years, utilizing their own
understanding of farmers' resources, desires, and
capabilities, and with increasing farmer participation in
researcher-managed trials. After analyzing results from
previous trials, the best alternatives are then placed in
farmers' hands for their evaluation. Keeping in mind that
it is the farmer who must ultimately make decisions
concerning adoption or rejection, farmer-managed trials
(FMTs) provide the opportunity for farmers to become the
primary evaluators of new technology. In order for the
farmer to be able to evaluate the results of a trial, the
trial must possess three critical characteristics: 1) the
technology must be simple enough for farmers to comprehend
and manage it; 2) farmers must use their own resources so
they can understand all implications of the alternatives;
and 3) design of the trial must be simple enough that
farmers can observe differences in treatments and/or
measure them, with their own means of measurement. An
example of an FMT might be the testing of a new cultivar
under the farmers' normal planting and cultivating
procedures. The farmers pay all their usual costs plus
the cost of the seed of the new variety. Design of the
trial would be simple: farmers plant one plot with the