Northeast Brazil, which comprises more than half of the country's family farming units, is threatened to lose almost all this huge work and production potential due to ineffectiveness shown for several public policies to insert those farm units into the market. The agricultural research system, as a provider of technical innovations, shares responsability for that situation, since it was not able to make farming systems more efficient and adoptable by final beneficiaries. Nevertheless, such situation begins to change in the region. Number of experiences with multidisciplinary and participatory methodologies, more adapted to local family farming demands, is growing quickly. As a consequence, more valuable results can be expected from family farming research. Three of these methodologies, described in this paper, municipal zoning, rapid appraisal of the marketing and processing chain and farmer-managed trials for technology validation are examples of the the research system efforts to attain higher objectivity.