Restoring the Soil - Canadian Foodgrains Bank

80Annex 2: The EvidenceFor example, smallholder farmers never do 15 replications of exactly the same experimenton one small piece of land. But if a technology is to the liking of the farmers,we may have hundreds of replications of very similar experiments, spread acrossdozens of soil types, topographies and different (though fairly similar) managementstyles. Mathematically speaking, these trials will give us a much better approximationthan will a scientific experiment of what will happen when other smallholder farmersreplicate that technology on their own farms. This better predictability from farmers’experiments occurs because a scientific experiment will normally include dozens ofreplications on fairly uniform micro-plots, carried out on one soil type (which usuallyhas a bizarre history of cultivation under past experiments), on flat land (hillsideexperimental stations are virtually nonexistent) and under only one standardized,and often very expensive, form of management. Each of these conditions makes thescientific experiment less representative of the farmers’ conditions than do the farmers’experiments.Despite the informal nature of their experimentation, the varied trials smallholderfarmers do can be analyzed mathematically to find out to what precise level of confidencewe can generalize their results across a wider population of farmers.I have not done any such analysis. I have visited the fields of thousands of farmers andseen the results. This book is a summary of what I have learned. The vast majority ofthis book’s content is based on those observations of individual fields and on conversationsI have had with the owners, plus conversations with dozens of the owners’neighbors and collaborators. It also includes observations of tens of thousands of otherfields from moving vehicles.For agricultural extension purposes, most agricultural research in the world is donewith the purpose of trying to predict what technologies farmers will find beneficial,and will therefore adopt. When it comes to gm/ccs, we do not need to predict whatsystems farmers will adopt in the future. We already know what technologies theyhave adopted in the past. The only predictions needed are whether or not otherfarmers working in similar conditions will act in the same way. This prediction is besttested by showing other farmers the results of the technology, and then watching whatthey do or don’t do with it.If we believe that farmers are, by and large, economically rational (given their ownpriorities), we don’t need to be guessing about whether the gm/cc technologies in thisbook will be beneficial to smallholder farmers under the conditions in which they arebeing used. The very fact of widespread farmer use, given the assumption of farmerrationality, leads us to conclude that these technologies are, in fact, benefiting thefarmers.Still, some readers may have questions about issues that are more in the realm of thetheory of soil fertility rather than farmer adoption of technology. I will refer to a fewof those questions and issues here.