Can elevating farmers' voices revolutionize crop design?

Across the world, agricultural scientists are starting to work backward. For years, they’ve seen how improved crop varieties — which take decades to produce in a lab — are rejected by the farmers who need them most. They might be pest-resistant, but take too long to cook. Drought-tolerant, but require expensive fertilizers. And high-yield, but with leaves that are too small to eat. But now, many are shifting the way they design hybrid crops by involving farmers at the very start of the process instead of years after a solution has already been created by scientists in a lab. “It’s not easy — the process is convoluted and challenging. But at this point, we have no option but to make sure everyone has a voice,” said Dr. Biswanath Das, a breeding network coordinator at CGIAR, the world’s largest global agricultural innovation network. Despite taking up just 12% of the world’s agricultural land, small-scale farmers produce over a third of the global food supply, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. At the same time, these farmers — some 600 million globally — are particularly vulnerable to severe weather events. They’re also less likely to have fertilizers, equipment, and irrigation mechanisms to counter climate shocks. But increasingly, the need to support these farmers is being recognized. Late last year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced a $1.4 billion investment to help small-scale farmers adapt to climate change, funding that would double the foundation’s already-substantial investment in CGIAR’s agricultural programs. “We’re in the middle of a kind of transition point, where we’re trying to understand better what farmers’ preferences are,” said Das.“The changing climate has made it imperative for us to better understand what farmers want, and what could drive their adoption further.” Brian Dowd-Uribe, an associate professor at the University of San Francisco, said that traditionally, modified crops only reach farmers after years in a laboratory — by the time the crops hit a field trial, a farmer's needs may have shifted — or, scientists might realize they were targeting the wrong thing all along. On top of that, it’s a process that takes time. John Derera, CGIAR’s senior director of plant breeding, said it took 17 years to create a type of cooking banana that was deemed “acceptable” among 75% of the Tanzanian farmers they surveyed. A current project targeting smallholder farmers in West Africa is an example, said Dowd-Urib. In the early 2000s, researchers began to develop a modified cowpea variety that would help withstand pests. It went into field trials in 2008 and was approved for commercialization in Nigeria and Ghana in 2021 and 2022. With promises to boost productivity, improve soil health, and reduce pesticide use, the strain was specifically created with small-scale farmers in mind. But Dowd-Uribe said that the project’s decision to focus on a “bush strain” varietal — one favored by commercial farmers — will make the project nearly obsolete for the smallest scale farmers, who prefer a creeping variety that can be interspersed with other crops, require less weeding, and could be harvested multiple times a year. “Typically, this process will take between 12 and 15 years,” said Dr. Jessica Kampanje Phiri, a social anthropologist and co-principal investigator of the project at the Center of Innovation for Crop Improvement for East and Southern Africa. “Often, [the seeds] only get into farmers’ hands after that, during the testing phase. If people don’t like it, that means that money has been wasted.” There was also the fallout from “Bt cotton” in Burkina Faso, Dowd-Uribe said. The genetically modified cotton crop was proven to keep pests away, but only with “proper attention to growing dynamics, pesticide use, and fertilizer use at the right time” — a mix of necessities that most smallholder farmers couldn’t make work with limited budgets. According to Dowd-Uribe, the impact of that was massive: Despite paying more for a costlier set of seeds, nearly 60% of smallholder farmers lost money from their investments in Bt cotton. “I think that many of the organizations and even some of the research scientists will say that they are ‘farmer-centered’ and producing ‘farmer-centered’ crops because they are creating crops ‘that address their needs,’” said Dowd-Uribe. “But the rub is what is meant by ‘farmer centered’ — and how much of a role farmers play in that process.” Even so, the need for meaningful inclusion does seem to be latching on. One attempt to do so is through CGIAR: The consortium is trying to create country- and crop-specific “product design teams” of scientists, small-scale farmers, government representatives, and others with a stake in hybrid seed development. It’s an initiative that began in 2022, and ever since has spread to 15 countries across Eastern and Southern Africa. “The idea is that [breeders] will use these target product profiles to make their next set of decisions,” said Das. “Hopefully, within the next cycle of breeding — four to five years — the crosses breeders make will be based on the target product profiles.” CGIAR isn’t the only institution trying to pull in farmers’ voices. Kampanje Phiri is part of a team of social scientists and plant breeders working toward improved varieties of cowpea, a staple legume across the African continent. Since 2020, her team has worked with farmers to understand the soil, climate, and weather patterns of specific regions, along with the different challenges farmers face. They’re now folding those insights into the design of a new cowpea variety, one that will emphasize traits to match farmers’ preferences. The process is more time-consuming, said Kampanje Phiri, but essential — especially when targeting the small-scale farmers who bear the brunt of climate change. Still, challenges remain. Even once a fuller set of voices are added to the mix, Das said that really understanding the needs of small-scale farmers is extremely challenging, as each has their own individual issues and preferences. And even if you get more voices in a room, there’s always a risk that some will be left out, he said — be that because of language and translation, or because of the traditional dominance of scientists’ voices. On top of that, there are millions of small-scale farmers worldwide, with needs that differ even within the same region. That’s hard to aggregate, Das said, and many grants and funding streams won’t accommodate the time for it. There also isn’t much time left to get this right. By 2050, nearly 80% of small-scale farmers in India, Ethiopia, and Mexico are projected to be affected by drought, extreme heat, or floods, according to a recent analysis from McKinsey & Company, altering their farmland’s ability to produce crops, or destroying what’s already growing there. The analysis found that by 2050, 450,000 square kilometers of land currently suitable for rice cultivation could be lost in India alone. “Inclusion won’t solve everything,” agreed Dowd-Uribe. “Nonetheless, when the pendulum is so far to one side, inclusion can hopefully bring it back to a space where there’s more ownership, more ideas, and more co-production — and that’s what needs to happen.”