How inclusive design is shifting power to farmers and closing the seed adoption gap 

Researchers from the Alliance’s Artemis project developed mobile AI tools and farmer feedback systems in Tanzania and Colombia to transform how crop breeding responds to real-world smallholder needs.

Across the Global South, crop breeding programs face a recurring challenge: the gap between improved varieties developed in research stations and the realities of smallholder farms. This mismatch is a byproduct of breeding systems that have historically been centralized, top-down, and data-poor, thus limiting their ability to reflect local growing conditions or farmer preferences.