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Growing new varieties produced by plant breeding is an attractive option for farmers. The varieties yield more grain; and the only additional labor needed is for harvesting this extra grain. Farmers in more favorable areas have benefited the most from modern plant breeding while those cultivating more marginal lands have suffered from a dearth of suitable, new varieties. Even in the more productive environments, plant breeding has often resulted in low on-farm varietal diversity, and benefits have been lower than were possible because obsolete cultivars are all too commonly grown.

Making plant breeding more market-oriented can help solve diverse problems. The new varieties are more likely to better meet farmers' particular needs for specific environments. Market-oriented plant breeding increases the speed of varietal replacement and often increases on-farm varietal diversity.

Public-sector plant breeders particularly in developing countries have not used market-oriented approaches. Instead, a linear process of research and extension has been almost universally adopted, where breeders first develop, test and release new varieties, with limited involvement of farmers, and the extension services that promote them. In contrast, the private sector has long used market research where farmers test potential new varieties before their commercialization. Research and extension overlap because testing creates a demand for the successful new varieties.

When public sector plant breeders use the market-oriented approaches of the private sector, they are described as 'participatory'. However, better terms might be "market-led", "client-oriented", or "farmer-centered" breeding. The term "collaborative plant breeding" is an alternative but also describes a particular type of participation (Biggs, 1989).

Market-led techniques have been usefully classified by the stage of the genetic material involved. Farmer-centered plant breeding concerns the entire breeding process ("participatory plant breeding" or PPB) whereas farmer-centered varietal selection ("participatory varietal selection" or PVS) is limited to the testing of finished varieties.

Varietal Selection

PVS tests varieties in farmers' fields not on research stations that might not represent these fields so accurately. Research focuses also on traits other than just high yield.

Farmers evaluate all of the traits that are important to them and then trade the traits off against each other. For example, they may accept varieties with lower grain yields but higher grain quality because they consider overall returns more important than just yield. They may also trade lower grain yields for earlier maturity because they want to have a second cropping.

PVS is a simple and more direct way of using multiple traits to assess the value of a variety to farmers. Quality traits can be assessed that are difficult or expensive to evaluate in conventional trials, e.g., the milling percentage obtained when large quantities of grain are milled, cooking and keeping quality, taste, and market price.

Varietal selection that is client-oriented is not controversial; breeders have long used on-farm trials. However, these traditional on-farm trials are commonly renamed as PVS even though they involve farmers to a limited extent. Conventional on-farm trials give farmers a limited choice of varieties that the breeders have already pre-selected. Trials are managed under a recommended package of practices decided by scientists, and do not use powerful techniques, such as matrix ranking, for discriminating among varieties.

Nonetheless, PVS is now acceptable even to national research institutes and non-government organizations (NGOs). Several international agricultural research centers help facilitate substantial networks of national program partners for PVS. Some examples include Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maiz y Trigo (CIMMYT) for maize in southern Africa and for wheat in marginal areas in South Asia; the West Africa Rice Development (WARDA) for rice in West Africa; and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) for upland rice.

All PVS use some form of mother and baby trials even if they are not named in this way. Mother trials that are fewer in number than the baby trials compare all of the test entries. In the baby trials, each farmer runs trials for only one or two of the test entries.

PVS has been greatly successful in many crops and countries when used in marginal areas with low-resource farmers. It is also effective in more productive environments where it contributed to increased on-farm varietal diversity and faster varietal replacement. However, for productive environments, on-station trials can represent quite well the situation in farmers' fields so the advantages of PVS in favorable environments, while they can still be substantial, tend to be less than those for marginal areas.

Client-Driven Plant Breeding

PVS is both the building block for PPB and the means of testing its new products. Farmer-accepted cultivars identified by PVS make ideal parents for farmer-centered breeding programs. When these produce potential varieties, farmers can immediately test them. This is one of the greatest advantages of working with farmers in a system where research and extension is done in parallel. Typically, seven to 10 years are saved so the rate of return on the investment in plant breeding is considerably increased.

Results from PPB programs are fewer and generally more recent than those for PVS because breeding takes longer than simply testing varieties. The need to involve farmers in breeding is also less accepted than in the case of varietal selection. Examples include rice breeding in India and Nepal; maize in India; cassava and beans in Latin America and barley in Syria.

In PPB, selection is in the target environment--farmers' fields--and this should result in faster genetic progress in that environment. Evidence, so far, shows that this advantage is not outweighed by any reduced economy of scale because PPB varieties are still adopted in large areas.

Farmers can be involved in breeding programs in several ways:

Document(s) 27 of 34