United States has reduced the number of young people on farms, the couple
remains on the land.

 What a contrast this complete farm family is to small Third World farms.
Women are often active in all aspects of food production, both by custom and by
necessity, as temporary migration by males to participate as wage laborers in
construction, extractive industries and cash crops for export. This results in
the feminization of farming in many areas (Deere and Leon de Leal, 1980). In
the Third World, division of labor by sex has also been traditional. Even when
women were the agriculturalists, men provided complementary labor, such as
clearing the fields or plowing. Temporary male migration upsets the traditional
balance.

 A fifth condition that has aided the-development of U.S. agriculture has been
the ability of the larger economy to absorb the non-competitive farmers in other
employment sectors. Thus, our research and extension efforts have been able to
focus on the more successful large,, family farms. This "solUtion" for marginal
farmers is unacceptable in much of the Third World because other opportunities
to generate family income are not available. Further, because of price and other
incentive structures, food production in the Third World is generally carried out
by these marginal farmers, while the modern farmers are large and engaged in
export agriculture.

 A sixth condition that exists in the United States, but not in Third
World countries, is the close cooperation between private and public sectors
in adapting and distributing technological innovation. The relatively high
purchasing power of L.S. farmers has led to the development of a strong
private sector in rural areas that forms the link between experiment station
and farmer. Private enterprise has had a long history of cooperation with
public. researchers in variety development, for example, focusing on adaptive
breeding, releasing and maintaining breeder seed varieties, and producing
high-quality plant seed and distributing it to farmers (Grcssman, 1982).
This division of labor between private and public sectors has led the private
sector to be that most closely responding to (and attempting to form)
farmers' needs. The international' Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT)
researchers have pointed out how, in developed countries, the agribusiness
sector integrates research results into effective technologies. "Develooing.
countries rar-ly have these mediating entities, and the bureaucracies and
incentive systems of public institutions do not encourage researchers to
play this integrative role" (CIMMYT, 1981, p. 10).


The Contributions of Farming Systems Research

 In our agricultural development work overseas, we must continually become
more aware of the conditions we assume exist and compare them to the conditions
that actually do exist. One tool that has evolved in the past decade to heip
in this-a tool that takes us back to some of the early research and extension
in the U.S. land-grant system-is Farming Systems Research and Development (FSR&-).

 What is FSR&D, and how can it help us counteract the biases arising from
assuming that the conditions in our own cultural setting exist all over? FSR&D
is aimed at increasing the agricultural welfare of the farm family by unrdr-