| Participatory
Farm Management (PFM) methods: a field manual
Methods
to assist farmers and researchers analyse resource use in
farms and households, and help farmers in decision-making.. |
 |
Background |
Measuring
and understanding asset use and decision making strategies are important
aspects of Sustainable Livelihoods analysis and intervention. ‘Participatory
Farm Management’ (PFM) methods assist farmers and researchers
to jointly quantify and analyse the use of resources in farms and
households, and help farmers in their decision-making.
They are designed to be used alongside existing participatory methods.
The methods can be used in sequence or independently of each other.
The manual outlines the methods and their potential uses so that
individual practitioners can adapt them to their own situation.
|
Guide to the tool |
-
Scored Causal Diagrams (SCD)
help examine causes and effects of problems and identify the ‘root’
causes. Scoring helps to analyse the relative importance of problems
and prioritise them.
- Participatory
Budgets (PB) examine a farmer’s use and production
of resources over time for a specific enterprise.
Their main uses are for:
- analysing
farmers’ existing activities, resource-use and production
- exploring the resource implications of a change to an enterprise
- comparing different enterprises
- planning a new enterprise.
-
Resource Allocation Maps
(RAM) examine resource use over the whole farm during
a specific period of time e.g. a month. RAMs
can be used for:
- looking at farmers’ decisions regarding resource allocation
in different situations.
- examining resource competition between different enterprises
at a specific time of the year.
- Resource
Flow Diagrams (RFD) help to analyse
flows of resources at the farm level
|
Link to the tool (word) |
This
manual is a section taken from a more extensive document by P. Dorward,
M. Galpin and D. Shepherd, January 2000, produced as part of the
Natural Resources Systems Programme (NRSP). All the methods have
been used with small-holder farmers in Zimbabwe and Ghana and the
examples given come from this work.
|
