Compare methods

	Agroecosystem Analysis	Farming Systems Research and Extension
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1987	2000
Originator	Gordon R. Conway	Michael Collinson and the international farming-systems research community (CIMMYT/CGIAR)
Type	Systems-diagnosis pipeline for agroecosystem performance	Iterative diagnostic and adaptive on-farm research pipeline
Seminal source	Conway, G. R. (1987). The properties of agroecosystems. Agricultural Systems, 24(2), 95-117.	Collinson, M. P. (Ed.) (2000). A History of Farming Systems Research. Wallingford, UK: CABI Publishing & FAO. ISBN: 9780851994055
Aliases	AEA, Agroecosystem Properties Analysis, Conway Agroecosystem Analysis, Agroecosystem Diagnosis	FSR/E, Farming Systems Research, On-Farm Client-Oriented Research, Whole-Farm Systems Research
Related	4	4
Summary	Agroecosystem analysis (AEA) is a systems-diagnosis framework, formalized by Gordon Conway in 1987, that characterizes any agricultural system through four properties: productivity, stability, sustainability, and equitability. Rather than judging a farming system by yield alone, AEA treats the agroecosystem as an ecological system shaped by human management and asks how much it produces, how reliably it produces it across seasons and shocks, whether it can maintain output over the long run, and how its benefits are distributed among the people who depend on it. The analyst bounds a system at an appropriate hierarchical level — plot, field, farm, watershed, or region — and uses interdisciplinary teams, ranked questions, and simple structured diagrams to surface the key relationships and the trade-offs among the four properties that drive design and policy choices.	Farming Systems Research and Extension (FSR/E) is an iterative, client-oriented research methodology that treats the smallholder farm as a whole interacting system rather than a collection of isolated crops, and designs technology around the actual circumstances and goals of homogeneous groups of farmers. Developed within CIMMYT and the wider CGIAR system from the 1970s and synthesized in Michael Collinson's 2000 history, FSR/E proceeds by diagnosing the whole farm, grouping farmers into recommendation domains who share circumstances, ranking their binding constraints, and then testing candidate technologies in farmer-managed on-farm trials whose results feed back into the next diagnostic cycle. Its defining commitment is that research priorities and experimental designs should follow from farmers' resources, constraints, and objectives, so that recommendations are not just statistically valid on a research station but adoptable on real fields.