Compare methods

	Farming Systems Research and Extension	Rapid Market Appraisal
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2000	2007
Originator	Michael Collinson and the international farming-systems research community (CIMMYT/CGIAR)	John Holtzman and the rapid-appraisal marketing tradition; FAO agrifood-chain guidelines
Type	Iterative diagnostic and adaptive on-farm research pipeline	Rapid, iterative field-appraisal pipeline for market and value-chain diagnosis
Seminal source	Collinson, M. P. (Ed.) (2000). A History of Farming Systems Research. Wallingford, UK: CABI Publishing & FAO. ISBN: 9780851994055	da Silva, C. A., & de Souza Filho, H. M. (2007). Guidelines for Rapid Appraisals of Agrifood Chain Performance in Developing Countries. Agricultural Management, Marketing and Finance Occasional Paper 20. Rome: FAO.
Aliases	FSR/E, Farming Systems Research, On-Farm Client-Oriented Research, Whole-Farm Systems Research	RMA, Rapid Reconnaissance of Agricultural Markets, Rapid Agrifood Chain Appraisal, Subsector Rapid Appraisal
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.	Rapid market appraisal (RMA) is a fast, low-cost, interdisciplinary field method for diagnosing how agricultural markets and value chains perform and where their binding constraints lie. Rooted in the rapid-reconnaissance marketing tradition associated with John Holtzman and codified for value chains in FAO's 2007 guidelines by Carlos da Silva and Hildo de Souza Filho, RMA trades the comprehensiveness of a formal survey for speed and flexibility: a small team scopes the commodity system, mines existing data to form hypotheses about constraints, and then conducts iterative semi-structured interviews with actors all along the chain — producers, traders, processors, transporters, retailers, and support services — refining its understanding as it goes and triangulating across sources. The product is a timely, actionable diagnosis of market structure, conduct, and performance that can guide investment, policy, or project design when a slow census-style study is neither affordable nor warranted.