Farmers' role in sustainable agriculture research

Involvement of farmers in sustainable agricultural research can have important benefits, since farmers originated many sustainable agriculture innovations and can contribute a valuable perspective different from that of researchers. However, this does not mean, as is sometimes said, that all kinds of sustainable agricultural research necessarily should give farmers a major role—perhaps the dominant role—in choosing topics and overseeing the work. This belief overlooks the fact that farmers are just one of many groups that publicly supported research is supposed to serve and that their interests do not by themselves embody the full range of goals that sustainable agriculture tries to achieve. Moreover, although farmers can bring valuable insights to research, these alone will not be enough to insure that a sustainable agriculture research program has an appropriate mix of applied versus basic, short-term versus long-term, and component-level versus system-level studies.