Compare methods

	Farming Systems Research and Extension	Mother-Baby Trial Design
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2000	2002
Originator	Michael Collinson and the international farming-systems research community (CIMMYT/CGIAR)	Sieglinde Snapp
Type	Iterative diagnostic and adaptive on-farm research pipeline	Linked on-farm experimental design pairing replicated and dispersed trials
Seminal source	Collinson, M. P. (Ed.) (2000). A History of Farming Systems Research. Wallingford, UK: CABI Publishing & FAO. ISBN: 9780851994055	Snapp, S. (2002). Quantifying Farmer Evaluation of Technologies: The Mother and Baby Trial Design. In M. R. Bellon & J. Reeves (Eds.), Quantitative Analysis of Data from Participatory Methods in Plant Breeding (pp. 9-17). Mexico, DF: CIMMYT.
Aliases	FSR/E, Farming Systems Research, On-Farm Client-Oriented Research, Whole-Farm Systems Research	Mother and Baby Trial Design, MBT Design, Mother-Baby Trial Approach, Mother-Baby On-Farm Trials
Related	4	4
Summary	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.	The mother-baby trial design is an on-farm experimental architecture, formalized by Sieglinde Snapp in 2002, that resolves the long-standing tension between statistical rigor and wide farmer participation in agricultural research. A small number of replicated 'mother' trials carry the complete set of treatments under good management and provide the controlled, analyzable comparison; surrounding them, a large number of simple 'baby' trials, each on a farmer's own field and each testing only a subset of the treatments against the farmer's usual practice, sample the real variation in conditions and capture farmer evaluation at scale. Linking the two — the mother for precision, the babies for breadth and realism — yields both defensible treatment estimates and credible evidence about how technologies perform and are judged across many real farms.