How Farmers and Tech Teamed Up To Better Test Crops

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.

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