Peer review

Tables, graphs, references p. 242-244

Information from adaptive research programs is usually summarized into ‘recipes’ for crop production that do little justice to the increasing complexity of farmers' decisions or to the large amount of useful information generated by mature research programs. A major challenge for exploiting the benefits of adaptive research is to find ways to synthesize and simplify information generated by research, into a form that can be effectively used by farmers. The concept of farmer recommendations and farmer stratification for extension advice, and farmers' needs for increasing amounts of specific information and conditional recommendations are discussed. But even with specific recommendations, there always remains substantial opportunity for farmers to adapt technology to their own needs, and this calls for a wider array of auxiliary information, improvements in farmers' understanding of the technology and increases in farmers' technical and managerial skills. Some implications for the organization, methods and philosophy of extension systems are also briefly reviewed.

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