Generating farm-validated variety recommendations for climate adaptation
2019
Fadda, Carlo | Etten, Jacob van
Crop varieties play an important role in climate adaptation, allowing farmers to adjust the varieties they use to suit new climate conditions. Several barriers stand in the way of this approach. First, variety recommendations are often based on data from trials done at research stations, which do not reflect performance in low-input agriculture. Second, a limited range of genetic materials reaches farmers’ fields, with elite material given preference and varieties from gene banks neglected. Third, variety recommendations are not specific enough to the areas where they are used. Finally, the recommendations are seldom targeted at decreasing climate production risk. To overcome these barriers, we present a new approach. The triadic comparisons of technologies (tricot) approach involves the cost-effective, large-scale, repeated participatory evaluation of varieties under farm conditions using novel material from national gene banks or plant breeding. The approach allows the use of a broad range of materials in on-farm testing. Because it combines the resulting variety evaluation data with environmental data, the approach can measure the responses of crop varieties under seasonal climatic conditions. The data can then be translated into concrete variety recommendations, including portfolios of more than one variety. We illustrate the approach with an example that uses simulated but realistic data.
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