Farmers' Own Research: Organic Farmers' Experiments in Austria and Implications for Agricultural Innovation Systems

Farmers’ experiments can be defined as the autonomous activities of farmers to try or introduce something new at the farm, and include evaluation of success or failure with farmers’ own methods. Experiments enable farmers to adapt their farms to changing circumstances, build up local knowledge, and have resulted in countless agricultural innovations. Most research on the topic has been conducted in countries of the south. In this paper, however, the authors present experiments of randomly sampled organic farmers in Austria, and they discuss implications for agricultural innovation systems.