In this study the IAT was developed to capture and integrate current understanding of the farming system and component processes, and to enable analysis of the potential impacts of change. It was realised early on that it is not possible to capture all of the complexity of the component processes and associated interactions of the smallholder farming systems in Eastern Indonesia within an operational model, and an appropriate balance is required between the level of detail employed, precision required, model flexibility and the input data requirements (Thornton and Herrero, 2001).