Farmer Research Committees need a lively and sustained communication with external sources of information and technology to keep on bringing innovations into their experiments.
After training, a Farmer Research Committee takes over the implementation and evaluation of on-farm trials over a multi-year period with minimal outside facilitation, and assumes the job of informing its community of its results on a regular basis.
When Farmer Research Committees recommend locally-proven seed and input-use practices, they and their neighbors know they can have confidence in this information, and this accelerates adoption and innovation.
At least 200 pilots of this methodology in Latin America demonstrate the type of support needed to keep a mature farmer research committee running over time and how this enables a small number of technical professionals to accelerate and expand acres of the poor to innovation.
This makes sense because the poor are usually farming in highly unpredictable and risky production environments, for which it is extremely expensive for an extension system to develop precise recommendations.
A Farmer Research Committee socializes the local experimentation that is ongoing on every farm to some degree, and makes this activity more systematic, better informed and more efficient for a larger number of beneficiaries.
The committee researches and advocates for designing, evaluating, and recommending appropriate technologies for the local community, while reporting back regularly on its results and use of funds.
Planning Farmer Research Committees can be greatly assisted by combining the use of a Geographical Information System (GIS) with wealth ranking, a participatory rural appraisal (PRA) tool.
The diagnostic process involves the Committee in talking to experienced farmers in their locality and visiting experiment stations, agricultural input suppliers and extension offices.
Farmer Research Committee experiments typically begin with several treatments compared with local practice tested on a very small scale.
Committees that are reporting back often invite local politicians, input suppliers, business people and experiment station researchers to this meeting.
The principal mechanisms for dissemination of Farmer Research Committee's results and recommendations are their day-to-day contact with neighbors and their Report Back meeting.