Bringing Farmers Back into Breeding: Experiences with Participatory Plant Breeding and Challenges for Institutionalisation

The purpose of this report is to provide an overview of Participatory Plant Breeding (PPB). It reviews the approach from both a technical and a social perspective and identifies the challenges for incorporating PPB in national plant breeding regimes..

User guide to the small N exploratory case study. RTB user guide

A qualitative study of a small number of farmers helps the research team to understand a seed system, such as local preferences for seed and varieties, and differences based on wealth, farm ecology or gender. The study should ask a few questions focused on important topics. Fifteen people per category is usually enough. Be aware of sampling bias. Review the literature and confer with colleagues before designing the interview questions. The results of the qualitative study will keep costs down by helping to design a second, quantitative study that asks the right questions of the right people

Potatoes and livelihoods in Chencha, southern Ethiopia

peer-reviewedPotato is highly productive crop and can provide a cheap and nutritionally-rich staple food. Its potential as a cash generator and source of food is much under-utilized in many emerging economies. In this paper we study the impact of an intervention that introduced improved potato technologies in Chencha, Ethiopia on the livelihoods of smallholder farmers. We collected information through in-depth interviews in order to explore possible pathways of impact on farmers’ livelihoods; and used this information as the basis for designing a household survey. The results show changes in agronomic practices and consumption; these changes were most pronounced among wealthy farmers who participated in the intervention. Farmers used the additional income from potato in different ways: wealthier farmers improved their houses and increased their livestock, whereas poor farmers mainly invested in furniture, cooking utensils, tools and in developing small businesses like selling and buying cereals, milk and weaving products in the local markets. Some wealthy farmers, who did not participate in the project, also derived some indirect benefits from the intervention. This underscores: i) interventions that promote uniform farming technologies in themselves are not always sufficient to improve the livelihoods of poor farmers, and ii) the need to broaden the scope of interventions so as to take into account the resources available to farmers in different wealth categories, and the diversity of strategies that they employ for improving their livelihoods. Our approach allows to understand and describe the different developmental effects of a single technological intervention on the different aspects of farmers’ livelihoods

A comparative study on banana seed systems in Mbarara district, western Uganda and Mukono district, central Uganda

Seed system interventions aim to provide farmers with clean, high yielding planting material. In order to make such interventions successful it is important to understand the traditional seed systems in which the interventions are made. This report describes the results of a comparative study between the banana seed system in Central and Western Uganda. These regions differ in cultivation history, production objectives and previous seed system intervention. These characteristics result in a difference in management practices, seed sourcing strategies and selection processes of banana planting material. In both areas, on-farm cultivar diversity is high, and maintained to fulfill multiple end-uses as well as to spread risk. In Central Uganda some cultivars are maintained due to cultural beliefs and their use in rituals. In the western region such motivations for cultivar maintenance were not mentioned. In Western Uganda farmers kept their banana mats small by regular de-suckering, which makes uprooting and replacing a mat easier. Selection of planting material in the western region is much focused on keeping existing mats healthy, whereas in the central region farmers focused mainly on the distinction between sword and water suckers. These insights into differences in preferences and motivations behind the selection of planting material and seed sourcing strategies can facilitate future seed system interventions and facilitate adaptation to farmers’ needs