Abstract
A farming systems approach to development has meant many things over the past 15 years, depending on its institutional and ecological setting, its target populations, and the goals motivating its implementation. Despite the diversity of approaches, and the sometimes rancorous discussion over which was best and why, the approach is now recognized in many places as the only one that can identify and respond to the needs of limited resource farm families, especially those in marginal ecosystems. Involving an iterative process of diagnosis, design, testing and extension, the farming system approach to date has done more to change research objectives at national and international institutions than to change actual farmer practices. By legitimizing what limited resource farmers do and why they do it, a farming systems approach lends itself to policy analysis as well. Recent research in farming systems suggests greater attention should be payed to exogenous variables, including policy and infrastructure, as well as to development of technology that really responds to the felt needs of limited resource farmers in improving their level of living.
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Cornelia Butler Flora is currently Professor of Sociology at Kansas State University, where she has an Experiment Station research appointment in addition to her teaching duties. She chaired the Technical Committee of the Farming Systems Support Project and for five years edited the Farming Systems Research and Extension Paper Series at Kansas State University. She regularly consults on international agricultural development projects, most recently in Honduras and the Philippines. She has published widely in the area of social change, particularly related to changing structure of agriculture and its effects on community in the United States and in developing countries, focusing on the relation of such changes to policy issues. She is president of the Rural Sociological Society.
Kansas State Agricultural Experiment Station Contribution No. 88-1-J. The comments by various people who reviewed an earlier version of this paper are gratefully acknowledged. They include Shelley Feldman, Donald Voth, and Herbert Lionberger.
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Flora, C.B. Farming systems approaches to international technical cooperation in agriculture and rural life. Agric Hum Values 5, 24–34 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02217174
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02217174