Farming Systems Research and Extension

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.