Each stresses another aspect of the issue. Fisher Very little has been published about the local knowledge of farmers involved in capital-intensive agriculture in industrial societies. The few relatively detailed studies of local agricultural knowledge in countries such as Canada, the USA and Australia have tended to focus on relatively distinct 'communities' of farmers with specific traditions. This article presents a brief account of a study of local knowledge of dryland salinity among farmers in the Hunter Valley in southeastern Australia. As a result of the growing recognition of the role of indigenous knowledge in sustainable development, we are now faced with the huge task of documenting and disseminating that knowledge, in the same systematic way that Western knowledge is generated, documented and disseminated.
Rapid modernization underscores the urgency of the task at hand.
At the same time, the present widespread use of computers offers a range of tools which facilitate certain aspects of the work. In some cases, this means formalizing and incorporating non-quantitative or descriptive local knowledge into a knowledge base. In other cases, it involves transforming existing databases, in order to approximate the world model of the local inhabitants. In developing countries existing research systems are not always able to generate the technologies needed to solve the problems of minority farmers, due to constraints on manpower and funds. Such farmers are forced to develop their own technologies to suit their particular conditions.