standing the whole farm in a comprehensive manner. The integrated demands of
the unit of production/reproduction for alternative sources and uses of land,
labor, capital, management, and equipment in the production system are related.
The totality of crops and animals, and their by-products, for both subsistence use
and for market, as well as temporary off-farm employment, are included. FSR&D
involves formal, interdisciplinary problem identification in participation with
the farm family, taking into account the needs of society as a whole. In
collaboration with farm families, appropriate technology is determined (usually
from available technology) and evaluated on their fields under their constraints.
FSR&O implies a two-way flow of knowledge between farm families and researchers.
(See Shaner, et al, 1932, for an extensive development of this definition.)

 Thus, farming systems research is, in essence, an attempt to use social
and production sciences together to approximate the conditions of research and
extension that exist in our country because of the relative economic equality in
our society and the relative equality and similarities in background of farmer,
researcher, and extension agent in the U.S.-conditions that cannot be assumed to
exist in the Third World. FSRD provides a proxy for political mobilization and
pressure, a method of articulating the various goals of the participants (development
agency, farm family, nation state), a combination of mental and manual work in
carrying out the experiments, an awareness of labor and management availability
by sex and age, and an unwillingness to define a farmer who is disadvantaged in
relation to land or capital as "inefficient."

 *Farming systems research tries to identify the logic of the farming practices
 the farmer actually uses. In the U.S. setting, the logic of why a farmer does
 something is rather clear to the researchers because the researchers themselves
 have used those practices, and perhaps grown up with them over time. The
 researcher in the United States intuits the problem and is able to bring about a
 solution. FSRiD provides explicit problem identification for cooperative problem
 solving.

 Farming systems research treats motivations and deals explicitly with
goals-factors that we can assume are equivalent between researcher, extension
agent, and farmer in our society, but which may differ radically in developing
societies.

 The activities farming systems research looks at are broad-perhaps broader
than they currently are on farms in the Uniced Staces. They Inc!ude crop
production and lives ockproduction-these of course are similar-as well as the
processing, storage, and marketing of crop and livestock products. Off-farm and
non-agricultural activities must be considered as well, particularly as they
impact on agricultural activities. There is a trend in U.S. agriculture toward
part-time farming-another set of factors impacting on goals, production, and
profit for the farm family.

 As we have shifted to monoculture in U.S. agriculture, more and more
processing and storage has taken place off the farm. This is true despite the
move toward building on-farm storage capacity that began in the '50s. Combines
do some grain processing, but on Third World small farms, processing is much
less mechanized and much more likely to be carried out on-farm.

 FSRgD determines constraints present in the society and tries to work within
them. If that cannot be accomplished (and generally farmers have been found to
be relatively efficient given the inputs available), FSR&D can only be successful