C.J.M. Almekinders

Participatory trials and farmers' social realities: understanding the adoption of legume technologies in a Malawian farmer community

This article presents results from a study exploring the reasons for low adoption of legume technologies to improve soil fertility by farmers from a community in central Malawi who took part in participatory trials. This study explores the influence of gender roles in agriculture and land ownership and socio-economic differentiation in the community. Because most women do not own land and are traditionally responsible for legume crops, they have little interest in managing soil fertility for maize crops. Men are not interested in using legumes in maize-cropping systems. Some are too poor: this group needs to complement their subsistence maize production with paid labour on the farms of better-off farmers; restricting the labour availability for their own farming activities. Wealthier farmers have access to, and prefer to use chemical fertilizer and cattle manure. Take-up rates among the middle group of farmers were also low. This study discusses how these (and other) factors influence the (non-)adoption of maize-legume technologies in Malawi and the effectiveness of participatory research. It emphasizes how differentiated farmer-realities affect the uptake of technologies identified as promising in participatory field evaluations.

What Does an Inventory of Recent Innovation Experiences Tell Us About Agricultural Innovation in Africa

Abstract Purpose: Within the context of the European-funded JOLISAA project (JOint Learning in and about Innovation Systems in African Agriculture), an inventory of agricultural innovation experiences was made in Benin, Kenya and South Africa. The objective was to assess multi-stakeholder agricultural innovation processes involving smallholders. Approach: Country-based teams used bibliographic searches, interviews with resource persons and field visits to identify cases. The inventory was developed iteratively according to a common analytical framework and guidelines inspired by the innovation system perspective. Findings and practical implications: The completed inventory includes 57 documented cases, covering a wide diversity of experiences, in terms of types, domains, scales and timelines of innovation. The inventory confirms the diversity of stakeholders involved in innovation, the diversity of innovation triggers and drivers, and the frequent occurrence of market-driven innovation. It also illustrates more original features: the typically long timeframes of innovation processes; the common occurrence of ‘innovation bundles’; and an often tight yet ambivalent relationship between innovation initiatives and externally funded projects. National teams faced several challenges during the inventory process, for example, in gaining a common understanding and making consistent use of key innovation-related concepts, and in accessing relevant information, as some case holders were reluctant to share their experience freely. Originality/value: The JOLISAA inventory contributes to illustrating that African agriculture is responding actively to the many challenges it faces. Documenting and sharing such a palpable dynamism may help to counter some of the pessimism and negative publicity that African agriculture usually attracts and to increase the motivation of many for making innovation happen across Africa.

Potato breeding in the Netherlands: a successful participatory model with collaboration between farmers and commercial breeders

Participatory Plant Breeding (PPB) is mostly considered relevant to smallholder agriculture in developing countries. PPB involves getting farmers to participate in plant breeding to overcome shortcomings in the formal plant breeding system. The potato breeding system in the Netherlands has a long standing tradition of farmer participation in breeding. This PPB differs from the ‘standard’ PPB model as there is substantial private sector involvement and the system is situated in a modern, western context. Since its inception, farmer-breeders have contributed substantially to developing this potato breeding system, which supplies a large diversity of crop varieties that are grown in very varied environmental conditions around the world and for different consumer markets. This paper describes the current organizational structure and practices, provides some historical background and analyses the functions, relations and interactions of the major actors in the system. It argues that a historically international and commercially orientated potato sector was able to prosper because of a supportive political and legal context, which provided public institutional support to private sector potato breeding activities. Farmers’ knowledge and skills are particularly well expressed and vital in breeding in potato—a very heterogeneous and vegetatively-propagated crop. A new PPB initiative called BioImpuls recently emerged and engages organic potato farmers in a search to develop late blight-resistant varieties for the organic sector. This supports the argument that farmers’ knowledge can substantially contribute to modern and diversified breeding. While Dutch potato breeding is a special case in various respects, our analysis identifies several key attributes which could inform the design of successful PPB programmes in developing countries.

Adapting Value for Cultivation and Use testing to stimulate the release of improved varieties for the organic sector. The case of spring wheat in The Netherlands

Value for Cultivation and Use (VCU), the mandatory variety testing system for agricultural crops in the European Union (EU), has been used as a policy instrument by favouring the release of variety types that enable socially desirable developments, such as reducing fungicide use. With this paper, we aim to assess whether VCU can be used to enhance the availability of varieties suitable to organic farming. Therefore, we analyse data of an organic spring wheat VCU project that was conducted between 2001 and 2004 at three locations in the Netherlands. Varieties selected through organic VCU were clearly more suitable for organic production than those registered through the conventional procedure. However, new varieties could not match the baking quality of the organic standard variety. We conclude that enhancing the number of suitable varieties for the organic sector requires adapting both conventional breeding programmes as well as the VCU system.