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LINDA K. GEORGEAGRICULTURAL
INNOVATION
Getting a new idea adopted can be very difficult.
This is all the more frustrating when it seems to the
proponents of the new idea that it has very obvious
advantages. It can be a challenge to try to intro-
duce new ideas in rural areas, particularly in less-
developed societies, where people are somewhat
set in their ways—ways that have evolved slowly,
through trial and error. It’s all the more difficult
when those introducing new ideas don’t under-
stand why people follow traditional practices. Ru-
ral sociologists and agricultural extension research-
ers who have studied the diffusion of agricultural
innovations have traditionally been oriented to-
ward speeding up the diffusion process (Rogers
1983). Pro-innovation bias has sometimes led soci-
ologists to forget that ‘‘changing people’s customs
is an even more delicate responsibility than sur-
gery’’ (Spicer 1952).
Although innovation relies on invention, and
although considerable creativity often accompa-
nies the discovery of how to use an invention,
innovation and invention are not the same thing.
Innovation does, however, involve more than a
change from one well-established way of doing
things to another well-established practice. As with
all innovations, those in agriculture involve a change
that requires significant imagination, break with
established ways of doing things, and create new
production capacity. Of course, these criteria are
not exact, and it is often difficult to tell where one
innovation stops and another starts. The easiest
way out of this is to rely on potential adopters of an
innovation to define ideas that they perceive
to be new.
Innovations are not all alike. New ways of
doing things may be more or less compatible with
prevalent norms and values. Some innovations
may be perceived as relatively difficult to use and
understand (i.e., complex), while others are a good
deal simpler. Some can be experimented with in
limited trials that reduce the risks of adoption (i.e.,
divisible). Innovations also vary in the costs and
advantages they offer in both economic and social
terms (e.g., prestige, convenience, satisfaction). In
the economists’ terms, innovation introduces a
new production function that changes the set of
possibilities which define what can be produced
(Schumpeter 1950). Rural sociologists have stud-
ied the adoption of such agricultural innovations
as specially bred crops (e.g., hybrid corn and high-
yield wheat and rice); many kinds of machines
(e.g., tractors, harvesters, pumps); chemical and
biological fertilizers, pesticides, and insecticides;
cropping practices (e.g., soil and water conserva-
tion); and techniques related to animal husbandry
(e.g., new feeds, disease control, breeding). Often
they have relied upon government agencies such
as the U.S. Department of Agriculture to tell them
what the recommended new practices are.
The diffusion of agricultural innovations is a
process whereby new ways of doing things are
spread within and between agrarian communities.
Newness implies a degree of uncertainty both
because there are a variable number of alterna-
tives and because there is usually some range of
relative probability of outcomes associated with
the actions involved. Rogers (1983) stresses that
the diffusion of innovations includes the commu-
nication of information, by various means, about
these sets of alternative actions and their possible
outcomes. Information about innovations may
come via impersonal channels, such as the mass