Process of on-farm trial design : the Honduran experience of 1978

Discussion of the design process covers, inter alia: "pre-analysis" surveys of the region; the design and administration of formal and informal farmer surveys; technical design issues, such as problems in defining the "real" cropping systems being used in farmer"s fields; and political (or institutional) design issues, centering around relationships between the FSR team and national commodity researchers. Detailed discussions of specific design problems encountered in each of three recommendation domains are provided, together with a series of recommendations on farm sample size, trial replication, plot size, and the logistics of dividing the FSR team into sub-teams by domain. Factors cited as key to a successful design effort include, inter alia, compromise among members of the FSR team and proper prioritization of the problems to be solved.