ABSTRACT
Matching crop varieties to their target use context and user preferences is a challenge faced by many plant breeding programs serving smallholder agriculture. Numerous participatory approaches proposed by CGIAR and other research teams over the last four decades have attempted to capture farmers' priorities/preferences and crop variety field performance in representative growing environments through experimental trials with higher external validity. Yet none have overcome the challenges of scalability, data validity and reliability, and difficulties in capturing socio-economic and environmental heterogeneity. Building on the strengths of these attempts, we developed a new data-generation approach, called triadic comparison of technology options (tricot). Tricot is a decentralized experimental approach supported by crowdsourced citizen science. In this article, we review the development, validation, and evolution of the tricot approach, through our own research results and reviewing the literature in which tricot approaches have been successfully applied. The first results indicated that tricot-aggregated farmer-led assessments contained information with adequate validity and that reliability could be achieved with a large sample. Costs were lower than current participatory approaches. Scaling the tricot approach into a large on-farm testing network successfully registered specific climatic effects of crop variety performance in representative growing environments. Tricot's recent application in plant breeding networks in relation to decision-making has (i) advanced plant breeding lines recognizing socio-economic heterogeneity, and (ii) identified consumers' preferences and market demands, generating alternative breeding design priorities. We review lessons learned from tricot applications that have enabled a large scaling effort, which should lead to stronger decision-making in crop improvement and increased use of improved varieties in smallholder agriculture.
ABSTRACT
The number of agricultural interventions promoting biofortified crops as a strategy to combat micronutrient malnutrition have increased significantly during the past decade. These interventions aim to improve the intake of key nutrients and sometimes other nutrition outcomes. In this study, we assess the impact of a market-oriented gender-sensitive agriculture-health project on household food consumption and food security. We use gender-disaggregated data from 842 sweetpotato farmers and a series of econometric techniques to assess the project's impact on food consumption household food security. The study finds unambiguous and strong impact of the project on both household food consumption and food security. Moreover, female-headed participant households benefitted much more from participation than did male-headed households. We further find that nonparticipant households would also have benefitted had they participated. The findings imply the importance of designing market-focused projects with a gender lens. They also imply that market-oriented agriculture-sensitive interventions do not necessarily harm the nutritional status of farm households.
