Crowdsourcing crop improvement

Jacob van Etten

Issue

Climate change means farmers need to make their crops and cropping systems adapt to new conditions, quicker than ever before.

Farmers rely on informal and formal seed systems to get access to seeds.

Photo: P. Casier (CGIAR).

Seed system

Almekinders et al.

Issues to consider

50% or more of all land is still not under modern varieties →unrealistic to change this in a few decades

Push models (credit+seed+other inputs) are not successful in marginal areas and can be hijacked by suppliers

Resilient, climate smart seed system combine the best from formal and local seed systems (more on that)

How do we scale up experiences in local seed systems (participatory plant breeding and variety selection, community seed banks, seed fairs, etc.)?

Resilience

From “fail-safe” to “safe to fail” design.

Resilience

Tight feed-back loopsDynamic reorganizationBuilt-in countermechanismsDecoupling, diversity, modularitySimplicitySwarming Clustering +_________________

Resilience

Tight feed-back loops

Tight feed-back loops

Is information flowing back from farmers to seed producers, breeders, and genebanks?

Current model is mostly supply driven, with few opportunities for feed-back loops.

New ICTs provide opportunities for tighter feed-back to learn about demand, challenges farmers face, while getting impact at scale.

Seeds4Needs

Crowdsourced Crop Improvement

Social learning

Crowdsourcing is cheap social learning

Constant circulation of information shapes opportunities to detect new demands and developments – which should be investigated using in-depth (phone) interviews, focus groups, ethnography, etc.