ILEIA Newsletter - LEISA Magazine - Farming Matters Farmer's Research in Practice: Lessons From the Field

This book is about farmers' own research. In many parts of the world, farmers are seeking ways to improve their farming systems and to adapt their practices to changing agroecological and socioeconomic conditions. The contributions to this book give evidence of how farmers adopt, adapt and formulate new ideas and innovations, try them out in different settings, evaluate and assess the results, and make decisions about their potential value for improving the way they farm. All of these experiments, no matter what methods they employ, are refened to here as farmers' agricultural research. This is a considerable expansion of the conventional understanding of agricultural research, which is usually limited to scientifically designed, highly methodological and closely controlled experiments and investigations carried out on national and international agricultural research stations and in the field.