So, why suggest and foster discord when it actually doesn’t exist? I know that a number of scientists who are challenged to evaluate the agronomic merits of SRI have a hard time doing so because it’s not really a well-defined set of practices that can readily be tested against “conventional practices.” It’s not always very clear what practices should be investigated as usually only a few of the typical SRI practices are adopted by farmers, and then often in a much modified way, and many different practices have become adopted under the banner of SRI. A quick run through the SRI literature shows that the crop in SRI can be transplanted either manually or by machine, direct wet seeded, dry seeded with machines, irrigated, rainfed, and grown with or without fertilizers, with or without herbicides, and with or without pesticides. Norman Uphoff, in his interview in the Farming Matters SRI issue, calls SRI “a set of ideas and experiences, a set of relationships, and a set of values.” Indeed, that’s difficult to evaluate in agronomic terms. Many who tried to do so were frustrated and, not being able to prove a specific agronomic or biological mechanism behind SRI, ended up being labeled “against SRI.”