Considerations for the planning, implementation and evaluation of on-farm experimentation in agroforestry farming systems

While agricultural research has developed over the last century with a concomittant increase in the sophistication of techniques and specialization of research personnel, agroforestry is a recent arrival on the applied science scene. Furthermore, although agricultural research has considerably increased agricultural production in some areas and for certain groups of farmers, the small farmers in the tropics have benefited much less. A major criticism of over-reliance on on-station agricultural researches that in many cases, conditions on such stations bear little resemblance to those under which the majority of farmers operate. Consequently, the relevance of the results to the needs and circumstances of small farmers is questionable. In this context, agroforestry researchers are in a unique position to incorporate relevant lessons from agricultural research into the very foundations of their approach to technology-generating research. This involves a shift from the conventional 'top down', heavy-handed methods that assume the researcher knows best and the farmer must do everything he is told, to one in which the farmer's opinions matter and he has an active role at all stages of technology generation and testing - a 'bottom up' approach

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