Learning from innovative farmers: spotting agricultural development options that work locally

Jonathan Steinke
Jonathan is a research fellow with Bioversity International, working on digital innovation for agricultural advisory services. He is currently pursuing a PhD at Humboldt-University in Berlin, Germany.

Around the world, agricultural development organizations often struggle with surprisingly weak adoption of innovations that had previously been successful at other places. If all goes well, the smallholder farmers addressed by a development program readily adopt and adapt newly introduced practices, such as improved management of crops and livestock. Not so rarely, however, promising innovations do not fit with local culture, cause extra labor at times when the farmers are already extremely busy, or show other unexpected downsides in the new context.
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Avoiding locally unsuitable interventions and designing better agricultural development programs by working closely with the local community is possible, of course. But participatory research can take a long time, and results are sometimes biased towards the local opinion-leaders, who are not always the most successful farmers. Could there not be a simpler way to find out “what works” under specific local conditions?

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