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Moderated conference on impact assessment of agricultural research: May 2014

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Tue, 6 May 2014 16:29:06 +0200
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My name is Ed Garrett, previously a farmer from the United States having a diverse background with livestock, crops, farm systems, and multiple scale and locations. I am completing a Fulbright Fellowship at the Hungarian Research Institute of Organic Agriculture in Budapest where I have been doing ethnographic research looking at On-farm Innovation and the needs of beginning farmers in Hungary.

 

Responding in part to the fifth issue raised by S.K.T. Nasar (Message 1), I want to recommend we take into account the changing body of knowledge on Agriculture (causes and effects) we have when doing our post evaluation on research.  Many programs will be found to have excellent post implementation outcomes on the basis of our state of knowledge when the research was first proposed.  But as our understanding of the many complex interactions in nature builds new knowledge, these excellent outcomes may now be considered inappropriate.

 

I see long term projects that were started with current knowledge and after the cycle of sometimes decades to reach impact assessment, we have new knowledge that may void the original intent of the research.  I don't make a claim for any single system of agriculture being superior or inferior but we know far more about the impacts of systems on natural resource bases now than 20, 30, or 40 years ago.  So how do we do an impact assessment on a program that may have done all it was supposed to do but we now know was based on a flawed rational for sustainable productivity?

 

This situation creates a special problem for the study of Agriculture as it creates at least a dual position for evaluation.  One is evaluation of the program based on the known world at time of inception. The other is the value of the outcomes in the known world today.  It is a problem that we marry ourselves to research because of investment, time, money, emotion, and become less able to consider if the research meets the needs of today.

 

 Moving forward, I recommend that we make an extreme effort to identify places where research was successful but changes in our understanding of processes has caused these outcomes to be minimized in their impact or actually now understood as negative impacts. Doing this may identify preparatory work that needs to be done or research types, funding issues, etc. that contribute more to long term positive impacts and outcomes or research types, methods, etc. that are more at risk.

 

Ed Garrett

Fulbright Fellow - Advancing Organic Agriculture in Hungary

Hungarian Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (ÖMKi)

Mikól tér 1.

H-1033 Budapest

Hungary

e-mail: ed.garrett (at) fulbrightmail.org 

  

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