This paper reports on key findings from a long-term study conducted between 2001 and 2009 with smallholder households from six villages in South Sulawesi and Central Lombok, to develop and test an approach for evaluating and increasing the adoption of cattle and forage improvement technologies. The approach is based on the principles of farming systems and participatory research and involved four main steps; (1) benchmarking the current farming system; (2) identifying constraints to cattle production and strategies to address them; (3) desktop modelling of the production and economic impacts of selected strategies; and (4) on-farm testing of the most promising strategies with 30 participant smallholder households.