Confronta i metodi

	Mother-Baby Trial Design	Agroecosystem Analysis
Campo	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Famiglia	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Anno di origine	2002	1987
Ideatore	Sieglinde Snapp	Gordon R. Conway
Tipo	Linked on-farm experimental design pairing replicated and dispersed trials	Systems-diagnosis pipeline for agroecosystem performance
Fonte seminale	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.	Conway, G. R. (1987). The properties of agroecosystems. Agricultural Systems, 24(2), 95-117.
Alias	Mother and Baby Trial Design, MBT Design, Mother-Baby Trial Approach, Mother-Baby On-Farm Trials	AEA, Agroecosystem Properties Analysis, Conway Agroecosystem Analysis, Agroecosystem Diagnosis
Correlati	4	4
Sintesi	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.	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.