In farmer meetings organized by a project technician, the results were presented in figure format, with a brief explanation of where and how the experiment was conducted. The meeting was thrown open to farmers to draw their own conclusions from the data and to share those with others. The only intervention from project technicians was to answer questions from farmers about why certain results were achieved, or what the underlying biological reason for results might be. Subsequent visits with some of the participating farmers revealed that they had reassessed their decisions on nitrogen use, and had actually reduced applications on cereal fields that followed a legume. There is a vital need for innovation in thinking about communication alternatives between farmers themselves, as well as among different people with different agricultural interests.
Farmers generally test through the process of trial and error.
Machinery is modified to see if a new configuration works or not, and the next change is built on the one that came before. It is unlikely that a replicated experiment conducted over time would yield more useful results. People learn from each other by seeing planter modifications in the barn or by observing the planter in action in the field. Much of the communication can be in the oral tradition or other means rather than written text. Information processing often seems to occur by individual testing of the idea against one's own experience using heuristics derived from previous trial and error learning.