Meyer (2004, p. 59) summarizes the applied methodology in terms of the following five points: “1. quantitative data, 2. concerning a single innovation, 3. collected from adopters, 4. at a single point in time, 5. after widespread diffusion had already taken place.” This method- ology enables a description of the evolution of cumulated adoption decisions over time, but it requires a reduction of the farmers’ activity to a simple dichotomy between adoption and re- jection. Nonetheless, the authors were themselves highly skeptical as to whether it would be possible to formulate the general shapes of diffusion curves, as the diffusion processes rele- vant to various innovations are vastly different in terms of the nature of communication among the adopters: “but it seems doubtful if any theoretic pattern can adequately conform to situations involving all degrees of interaction and isolation; to economic practices as well as to styles” (Ryan & Gross, 1943, p. 24). Although Ryan and Gross applied this caveat mainly to the question of which shape a diffusion curve may take (e.g., normal distribution, logistic curve), it can also be understood as a general warning against reducing the complex evolution of diverse innovations to allembracing theories, not to mention mathematical models.