Getting any industry to adopt new technologies aimed at transforming the way it operates can be slow and expensive work. This is particularly true with agriculture, and especially with smallholder agriculture in developing regions like sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. This is where smallholder farmers themselves can legitimately lend a hand. They may not be trained agricultural scientists, but they definitely have a role to play.

The process of moving laboratory work to field trials to smallholder farming and ultimately to dinner plates everywhere—the scaling factor—isn’t a smooth one. Researchers working on smallholder ag innovation seem to struggle with it. The key is to incorporate the farmers directly into the R&D process, asking them what kinds of seeds and technologies they want, doing trials on their farms, and so forth. Unlike most other funding agencies that have more of a top-down agenda or prescriptive approach, Grow Further is open to a variety of approaches to improving farming and prioritizes participatory projects.

Innovation and crossing the “valley of death”

R&D investment in any sector involves spending money on designing, testing, and refining technologies without knowing quite what might come of it. In the 1990s, Sony spent big on a technology it was sure would be a winner: the mini disc and mini disc players. Apple’s iPod and downloadable music made those investment dollars blow up in smoke. The crux is the uncertainty—Sony probably would never have invested in developing mini discs had it been able to predict the iPod and downloadable digital music.

There is a lot of guesswork involved in R&D. Scientists can understand the feasibility of technologies and what their impacts might be, but they ultimately don’t know for certain what the impacts of their research will be.

Justifying R&D spending means dealing with probabilities. Researchers tell their funders, ‘A similar R&D project reaped big returns, so this proposal should do the same,’ and so forth. Even though agricultural R&D has proven itself again and again, there’s never any guarantee that a particular innovation will make a measurable impact at scale, meaning adoption by a large number of farms and real improvements in things like production and disease resistance. Any technology requires marketing and distribution, but in agriculture adoption tends to be slower than in other sectors.

Participatory research

Michigan State University researchers Sieglinde Snapp, James DeDecker, and Adam Davis have studied the importance of so-called farmer-participatory research.

Writing in the Agronomy Journal, the researchers say farmer participatory research “is an important approach to help ensure relevance and define locally adapted solutions for enhanced adoption of sustainable agriculture technologies.” The research trio says farmer-participatory research improves the odds of R&D success. “Problems and potential solutions are identified by farmers in collaboration with educators and scientists,” they explain. “Best bet options are tested through on-farm research, observations are made by all parties, results are synthesized and discussed, and an iterative process of fine-tuning continues.”

Farmer participatory research can be challenging. It not only means setting aside pre-conceived notions of what’s best for farmers but also including women, running rigorous experiments on real farms, etc. It’s related to citizen science, where members of the public count birds or collect other research data, but different in that scientists and farmers are partners in developing a product or technique.

Successfully scaling through farmer R&D participation

The Michigan State team advocates for what they call the “mother and baby trial” approach. In this R&D approach, scientists collect more detailed data in “mother trials” and farmers in widely dispersed locations report just a few key measurements, such as yields. The scientists argue that this type of participatory agricultural R&D should be occurring on developing country farms much more often than is the case now. “There are remarkably few examples of engaged co-learning with farmers,” they said.