Farmer involvement in agricultural research is limited by inadequate funding, institutional policies and hierarchies, disciplinary specialization, and incompatible personalities. Additional barriers include academic emphasis on carefully controlled experiments, research priorities driven by personal interest, and farmers' reluctance to disclose trade secrets. Priorities for research conducted with public funds should be identified through a democratic process involving representatives from all sectors of agriculture. A broad, multidisciplinary, systems approach to agricultural research is needed; and farmers and researchers should consider long-term implications of projects. Better balance needs to be achieved between basic and applied research, and both should encourage innovation within the context of democratically determined research priorities. Opportunities abound for involving farmers in research as providers and recipients of information, as participants in determining priorities and ensuring practicality of methods, as collaborators and/or subjects for on-farm investigations, and as project evaluators. Farmers also need to take more initiative in getting involved in the political processes that set the stage for agricultural research.

Involvement of farmers in sustainable agricultural research can have important benefits, since farmers originated many sustainable agriculture innovations and can contribute a valuable perspective different from that of researchers. However, this does not mean, as is sometimes said, that all kinds of sustainable agricultural research necessarily should give farmers a major role—perhaps the dominant role—in choosing topics and overseeing the work. This belief overlooks the fact that farmers are just one of many groups that publicly supported research is supposed to serve and that their interests do not by themselves embody the full range of goals that sustainable agriculture tries to achieve. Moreover, although farmers can bring valuable insights to research, these alone will not be enough to insure that a sustainable agriculture research program has an appropriate mix of applied versus basic, short-term versus long-term, and component-level versus system-level studies.

The public agricultural research and extension system has provided the foundation for great improvements in U.S. agricultural production. However, our incomparable productivity has brought with it serious problems. These problems have also led to a rapidly changing perception about both agricultural scientists and today's conventional agriculture. Critics are placing high on the agenda of the agricultural research and extension establishment the need for alternative technologies that are more sustainable and less exploitative of our resources. The growing demand for alternative systems offers challenges for every part of the establishment-research and extension administrators, branch station/research center directors, and faculty. These challenges and how they should be met are discussed. Alternative systems will become the conventional agriculture of tomorrow.