With food insecurity escalating globally-345 million people across 82 countries faced acute food insecurity in 2022-there is an increasing need to test and introduce new crop varieties that are tailored to local conditions and aligned with community needs and capacities.
Historically, the collaboration between farmers and agricultural researchers faced significant challenges. Crop varieties and technologies were typically tested in large-scale field plots under uniform conditions, with little consideration for how different weather patterns might impact yields. This approach also did not engage farmers, resulting in limited interest and participation.
Jacob van Etten, Principal Scientist and Director for Digital Inclusion, noted that the tricot approach (short for triadic comparison of technologies) was initially developed to foster a cooperative "citizen science" model. This model enables new crop varieties to be tested directly in farmers' fields, within the actual contexts where these crops are intended to be grown.
"It's the interaction between people and technology that drives innovation," he said. "We are still doing methodological research on how we can design trials in a way that farmers can get out of it what they want to get out of it."
From Citizen Science to Collaborative Farming
Brazilian scientist Kaue de Sousa, a researcher at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, began working with tricot in 2016 as a data analyst for the first set of data collected in India.
"Tricot helped to put the farmers' fields at the center of the agricultural experimentation: unlike previous approaches, farmers don't evaluate or comment in someone else's plot, but in their own small plot," de Sousa explained. "This increases collaboration and makes the communication more interesting, not only to farmers and researchers, but to the whole community."
A 2024 study involved hundreds of smallholder common bean farmers from 140 villages in the Trifinio region of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. These farmers evaluated tricot-a group-based participatory variety testing approach-against a control method to assess the effectiveness of the different approaches.
The study's lead author, Martina Occelli, pointed out that national programs can benefit from the cost-effective, equitable, externally valid, and scalable nature of citizen science on-farm testing to inform breeding programs.
"A citizen science on-farm testing approach should be used for on-farm testing and a group-based agronomy training could be delivered separately, for example to farmers who have gone through one round of citizen science on-farm testing," she says adding that a hybrid approach would lead to fewer farmers dropping out of the trial and increase data value.
"It would also benefit farmers through a group-based training approach," she says.
Emerging Benefits of Farmer-Led Research
Van Etten emphasized that tricot has matured to the point where researchers can now consider organizing farmer networks to scale up, build experience, and focus more on farmer needs.
"We are still doing methodological research on how we can design trials in a way that farmers can get out of it what they want to," van Etten says, adding that if research is more farmer-driven, they can help guide the technological direction of agronomical research.
"It doesn't mean that it's an adversarial idea, it's about how to put different innovations side by side with farmers."
Another 2024 paper, "The tricot approach: an agile framework for decentralized on-farm testing supported by citizen science. A retrospective," authored by de Sousa, van Etten, and their colleagues, discussed ongoing challenges. These include maintaining enthusiasm, skills, and financial support among the scientific, technical, and farming communities, as well as ensuring that tricot participants better represent the gender and socio-economic diversity within farming communities.
As more researchers and private extension networks begin to adopt tricot globally, the benefits of involving farmers in research continue to emerge.
A July 2024 study from Uganda demonstrated that applying the tricot methodology enabled researchers to consider not only crop-specific data but also the culinary preferences of farmers, such as taste and ease of cooking. The study also explored the role of gender in crop preferences.
Watch a related video here
Research Report:On-farm evaluation of cassava clones using the triadic comparison of technology options approach
Related Links
International Center for Tropical Agriculture
Farming Today - Suppliers and Technology
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