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 How should such extension success be evaluated? Must extension services

 be considered effective when they result in farmer adoption of new

 techniques, even if these techniques are not profitable?

 This problem points to further complications in evaluation of

extension. Perhaps the goal of extension is not so much the populari-

zation of a particular agricultural technique, but rather the spread of

a particular mode of analysis so that the farmer can more accurately

evaluate his experiments. Record keeping,. rigorous cost accounting,

and statistical analysis give the farmer more accuracy in selecting

and changing continuously improved techniques over long periods of time.

Certainly this approach to analyzing farm innovation is far more useful than!

simply convincing farmers blindly to obey a suggestion to buy for single

season. It clearly is far more difficult to measure the long-term pay-

off of this new analytical approach than to estimate the profitability

of a single enlarged sugar crop. The long-term consequences of blind

obedience, however, both economically and politically, can be most severe.

 The final and most serious problem of evaluating extension

 systems is that the systems and their results are inevitably, intimately

 and inextricably tied to the entire political, economic and social order.

 The question of who benefits from an extension system is in the final

 analysis shaped by patterns of distribution within the family, which are

 shaped by broad cultural factors; by the interaction within villages,

 which is closely related to land tenure relations; by urban-rural inter-

 actions as reflected in price, tax, investment and migration patterns;

 and by international market structures.