How Farmers and Tech Teamed Up To Better Test Crops
- From
-
Published on
15.08.24
- Impact Area

For over a decade, farmers across the world have been working hand-in-hand with researchers at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT and their collaborators to develop a better way to test new crop varieties and improve food security in their communities.
Food insecurity is on the rise worldwide, with 345 million people in 82 countries suffering acute food insecurity in 2022; making it more important than even to test and roll-out new crop varieties adapted to changing local conditions and in keeping with local needs and capabilities.
But it wasn’t always so easy to get farmers and agricultural researchers on the same page: not so long ago, most crop varieties and other technologies were tested in large-scale field plots under generic conditions. This meant there was little attention paid to how weather conditions affected crop yield and there was also little interest or buy-in from farmers.
Jacob van Etten, Principal Scientist and Director for Digital Inclusion, explains that tricot, (an abbreviation for triadic comparison of technologies) was originally developed to create a more cooperative “citizen science” focus, allowing new crop varieties to be tested directly in farmers’ fields, in the same context where they will hopefully be grown after the study.
Related news
-
CGIAR Accredited to UNEA: Bringing Food, Land, and Water Systems into Global Environmental Policy dialogues
Multifunctional Landscapes Science Program09.07.25-
Biodiversity
-
Climate adaptation & mitigation
-
Environmental health
-
Food security
CGIAR, the world’s largest agricultural research partnership, has been officially accredited as an…
Read more -
-
ICRISAT to Deliver World-Class Services as CGIAR’s Breeding Resources South Asia Hub
International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT)07.07.25-
Biodiversity
-
Food security
Strategic collaboration to scale innovation and deliver harmonized, high-quality support across CGIA…
Read more -
-
Reviving the earth: Soil health insights from Akole and Nandurbar, Maharashtra, India
The Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT)07.07.25-
Environmental health & biodiversity
In the pursuit of sustainable agriculture, soil is more than just dirt. It is a…
Read more -