The alternative agriculture paradigm has been a useful device to both define and direct a social movement toward a more sustainable agriculture. But because that paradigm was defined by male movement leaders, it reflects their gendered perspective and may be lacking elements that make it more useful for both women and men. In-depth interviews of women involved in sustainable farming organizations and on family farms experimenting with new practices validated the elements of the Beus and Dunlap paradigm: independence, decentralization, community, harmony with nature, diversity, and restraint, but also suggested the addition of two other elements that the women identified as part of an alternative agriculture vision: quality family life and spirituality. The highly gendered nature of agriculture in the V.S. and Canada, where male identity is highly conflated with the role of farmer in the conventional paradigm, may make it more difficult for men who have just joined the' movement to articulate the aspects of quality family life and spirituality which the women saw as critical.I The model linking superstructure and base to actions impacting sustainability is based on Eide (1982),

Achieving sustainable agricultural systems will require transformative changes in markets, policies, and science.

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This chapter has three contributions. The first one examines farming systems (FSR) extension in the USA, drawing attention to two cycles of FSR in extension in the country, first in the 1920s and 1930s when extension agents first sought to address the farm as a whole and latterly, since the 1980s with participatory approaches growing stronger and farmers becoming more concerned about the sustainability of their systems. The second contribution tracks the role of FSR in the evolution of the extension services in Chile. Farming systems development for policy formulation is described in the last contribution.

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