The Need to Change Approaches

It became obvious early in the 1970s that "bigger is better" was disastrous for developing
countries where the large majority of farmers were not being served by the progressive farmer,
trickle down strategy. In the less advantaged countries, as opposed to the industrialized
countries, little capacity was available to employ persons forced from agriculture into urban
areas. Employment needed to be maintained and productivity and income increased on small,
resource-poor farms in order for growth to take place.

The gains made by small farms in the Third World with Green Revolution technology were
made only by those with the best resource base, a limited minority. And the technology did not
even trickle down from them to other small farmers who did not have the advantages of the
better resource base. As it became apparent that all farmers in a community were not part of
the same "social system," it was realized that the progressive farmer strategy coupled with the
failed trickle down theory did not work, Figure 2. Other approaches were needed.


Target Categories

Research on technology diffusion was able to show ex post what characteristics were related to
slow or non-adopters (small, poor, little education, etc.), but was unable to provide ex ante
suggestions for effective intervention strategies (R6ling, 1988. p. 64).

The progressive farmer strategy coupled with the trickle down concept fails when the farm
population is not homogeneous, but heterogeneous. This, of course, is the usual situation.
"Laggards" and "Innovators," originally considered to be members of the same social system
simply because they lived in the same community, region or country, are very different farmers,
with different production environments.

Even though millions of farmers were bypassed because of the progressive farmer/trickle down
philosophy, a modification of this strategy can be used for "categories of farmers who have been
carefully identified as homogeneous and with innovations which have been developed to suit the
characteristics of those homogeneous categories" (R61ing, 1988. p. 71), Figure 3.

Ruling (1988, p. 77) uses the term "target categories" which appears to be a concept similar to
a combination of the recommendation and diffusion domain concepts used in FSRE (Wotowiec
et al., 1988). He uses relevant variables to segment a heterogeneous population into categories
and then designs an "intervention program content and strategy" relevant for each category, tests
it with representative members of the target category and then "mounts the intervention so as
to cover the intended target category selectively" (p.77). To the extent that the intervention is
agricultural technology and not diffusion technique, this strategy approaches current FSRE
thinking.