Category: Policy

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What seventy years of adoption research can teach genebanks

There’s a paper out that’s worth getting to grips with if you are interested in genebanks having an impact, even though it never actually mentions genebanks. David Pannell’s Reflections on Adoption of New Agricultural Practices distils more than 70 years and 5,000 studies of why farmers take up, adapt, abandon or reject innovations, be they new practices or technologies. It’s not specifically about plant genetic resources, but think of bringing back lost landraces, releasing a new variety or giving a neglected crop a second chance as an innovation and some of Pannell’s conclusions will seem very relevant to genebanks and their users. I’ll just pull out what I think are the top lessons.

Perhaps the main point Pannell makes is that testing something out isn’t adoption.

That sounds pretty obvious, but agricultural projects routinely give farmers something to try and then apparently count the resulting trial as adoption. Pannell points out that what is in fact being measured may be nothing more than farmers trying to figure out whether the innovation is good enough to keep using once the project support disappears.

The farmer planting that accession from the genebank or that new variety from the breeder is evidence of interest, not adoption. The more meaningful result is whether she is still using it, without being paid or encouraged to do so, several seasons later.

And speaking of trying things out, how easy that is to do matters for adoption, and it varies enormously among innovations.

Pannell notes that a new crop variety has an important advantage over other agricultural innovations: farmers probably already grow the crop. They can try the new variety right alongside the older ones without redesigning their whole farming system. In contrast, innovations that require systemic change can take decades to reach widespread adoption.

So, a package of sorghum landraces, or a new disease-resistant sorghum variety, being presented to sorghum farmers is one type of adoption problem. Promoting an opportunity crop that most farmers have forgotten how to grow is quite another. That may require new knowledge, equipment, markets and consumers, as well as a convincing reason to grow it. It’s bound to take longer.

Next, and perhaps more surprisingly, extension cannot compensate for a weak advantage.

Pannell is pretty clear: extension services can speed up awareness and evaluation early on, but they cannot manufacture adoption if and when farmers discover that an innovation isn’t sufficiently good.

That puts the emphasis back on the thing being offered. Does the new variety really outperform what farmers already have? Does the old landrace being revived have drawbacks? Does the neglected but really nutritious opportunity crop provide a return that compensates for the risks and additional work involved? If the answer is no, the best communications operation in the world won’t fix it.

Finally, every innovation is unique.

Pannell shows that different innovations being considered by the same farmers, and the same innovation being considered by different farmers, can have radically different drivers of adoption. Farmers aren’t a uniform population, and neither are innovations.

That is a useful reality check. The story of one neglected crop becoming an agricultural opportunity will never be repeated exactly. Each innovation has its own combination of advantages, constraints and players. There is no generic path to impact, though there may be recurring questions.

So what does this mean for genebanks trying to have — and measure — impact?

I’ll go with four fairly simple things. First, don’t treat germplasm distribution or a farmer field day as the end point: follow up and find out what breeders actually used, and farmers actually kept using. Yes, I know that takes time and resources, but it needs to be a routine part of the genebank’s work. Second, design projects tightly around the particular crop diversity involved, rather than assuming that the same adoption machinery will work across crops, countries, ecologies, whatever. Third, spend at least as much effort understanding why farmers might want the diversity in the first place as on getting it in front of them. If an advantage isn’t there, no amount of factsheets and posters and field days will rescue it. Finally, and maybe most importantly, remember that non-adoption isn’t always failure. Genebanks exist in large part for option value: material nobody wants now may be exactly what everyone wants in 2060. Plan the project so that even a failure to adopt teaches you something.

I’ve written plenty of posts here celebrating some interesting new diversity getting into farmers’ hands. I’ve written far fewer checking back to see what happened next. But that’s the more important story to tell.

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Missing use, or missing middle?

Genebank data seems to be in the air. Just in the past few days, I pontificated about descriptors, Mike Jackson has reminisced about the early days of rice molecular markers and CGIAR announced a big new initiative.

More data is always good to have, I’m sure. But, but, but… Genebanks are underused and more data will solve the problem? We’ve been saying something much like this for a long time now. Leave aside for the moment the question of whether CGIAR genebanks really are “underused.” Underused by whom, according to what metric, compared to what? But let’s just assume for the sake of argument that they are, indeed, underused. What if… Hear me out: what if that problem cannot be solved just by making genebank databases bigger, deeper and easier to search?

Ok, that will need some unpacking. But remember as you read this that I’m not saying that genebanks working with others to generate and share more data on nutritional quality or disease resistance is a bad thing. Just that it’s not enough. Never has been. Probably never will be.

Continue reading “Missing use, or missing middle?”

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When farming worlds collide

When we think about crops moving around the world — and we often do around here — the Columbian Exchange is the canonical example, and why not? The transatlantic movement of maize, potatoes, tomatoes, cassava, and chili peppers to Europe, Africa and Asia, and of wheat, sugar, coffee, and livestock to the Americas, was profoundly transformative. It reshaped global agriculture and diets more dramatically than any single event in human history after the Neolithic.

But similar, if maybe smaller-scale, “exchanges” happened long before 1492. The deep history of agriculture features several ancient “mixing bowls,” let’s call them, where traditions from different geographic origins met and interacted in fascinating ways. These are natural experiments in how new crops become part of diversified farming systems, and I think they can be especially useful in thinking about “opportunity crops.”

Usually, by opportunity crops we mean local or regional crops that were perhaps once more important, and then declined. Or, even if they were never very important, they could still do more, given the chance, whether for diets or incomes, or resilience: indigenous fruits and vegetables, forgotten grains, traditional tubers, you know the kind of thing. Their local resurgence is a crucial path to diversification, for sure. But those agricultural mixing bowls suggest that crops from the outside also have a role in enriching local farming.

Continue reading “When farming worlds collide”

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From preserving options to exercising options

There is nothing particularly new about the idea that the stuff genebanks conserve should be used.

For decades, plant genetic resources specialists have pointed out that conserving crop diversity is only half the job. If that. The other half is getting that diversity to the people who can use it. Yet the first bit has proved considerably easier than the second.

A new special issue of the journal Plant Genetic Resources is a useful reminder of how difficult that problem remains, and of what it might take to address it. I think we have included many of these papers in Brainfood over the past few weeks, but it’s worth exploring the story they collectively tell.

The starting point is not encouraging. A review of 20 national genebanks found widespread weaknesses in funding, management, information and safety duplication. Another analysis found substantial gaps and duplication in national collections, reflecting a history of collecting that was often opportunistic rather than strategic.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Several papers describe how to do the traditional job better: a monitoring and evaluation framework for identifying strengths and weaknesses, a robust set of performance metrics, and how seed-viability monitoring can be made more efficient by tailoring it to individual crops. Yet the experience of Sudan’s national genebank shows that even well-managed collections can be devastated by war, making safety duplication and international cooperation essential.

So big problems remain, despite the solutions that are being developed, and they matter. There isn’t much point talking about using genetic diversity if we cannot keep it alive, know what we have or protect it from disaster.

But suppose we solved these problems. Suppose national genebanks were adequately funded, efficiently managed, securely duplicated and well documented.

What would we have?

Very good collections of seeds.

That is not quite the same thing as useful collections of seeds.

This is where Cary Fowler’s argument in Reimagining the Role of National Genebanks comes in. Fowler argues that national genebanks should put greater emphasis on facilitating experimentation and use, particularly by farmers. The existence of a wider international conservation system gives them room to do so. Assuming that itself is properly funded, of course, but that’s another story.

Let me repeat: this is not a particularly new idea. Fowler – and others – have been saying it for a long time. The problem is getting it done.

Thankfully, again there are encouraging signs from other papers in this special issue.

One describes how Germplasm User Groups in five African countries increased farmers’ knowledge of genebanks, improved access to crop diversity and encouraged farmers to exchange diversity with one another. A companion study shows how farmers can evaluate large numbers of accessions under their own conditions and identify material that is useful to them, making national genebanks veritable drivers of crop diversification.

A study of Kenyan sorghum makes the point particularly clearly. Farmers evaluated 2,041 accessions, selected 393 with preferred traits, and subsequently chose 46 for seed saving and further evaluation. Their selections were not random. They were what farmers liked the look of.

That is more interesting than simply saying that farmers were given access to seed. Farmers identified what they actually valued.

A genebank knows where an accession came from and how to conserve it. It cannot necessarily tell us whether it will be valuable to a farmer facing a particular combination of drought, pests, soils, labour constraints or market opportunities. Farmers can.

The genebank therefore needs to be part of a process of discovery.

And this exposes the real problem. There isn’t much novelty in saying that genebanks should move beyond conservation towards use. The question is how.

Implementation requires more than a change of attitude, though that is certainly important. It requires information, relationships with breeders and researchers, equitable mechanisms for working with farmers, and institutions capable of supporting experimentation and distribution over time.

It may also require changing how we measure success. A genebank can be extremely successful at conserving thousands of accessions while most of its diversity remains effectively invisible to farmers. Is that a good genebank?

The final paper in the issue, on a descriptor system for in situ conservation, points gingerly towards a still broader vision in which diversity conserved in genebanks is connected with diversity maintained in farmers’ fields and natural populations.

We all know that preserving options is not enough. The challenge is to build a system capable of discovering which options are useful, getting them into the hands of people who can put them to the test, and helping them turn diversity into something that makes a difference.

The real measure of a genebank is not just how many options it preserves, but how effectively it helps society discover and exercise them. There are many ways of doing that. This special issue explores a couple. Let’s find lots more.

After all, genebanks have options.

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Brainfood: The diverse lives and times of crop diversity