FARMER RESEARCH NETWORKS

In order to bring about meaningful change for smallholder farmers, agricultural innovations must be integrated into and adopted within local communities. A critical shortcoming of conventional agricultural extension in the developing world is its top-down approach to change: deploying generalized methods over broad swaths of geographic and sociocultural space, with the assumption that their performance and value holds true across contexts. In practice, broadcast dissemination of “blanket” solutions can lead to interventions that are not adapted to meet local needs and under-perform in solving important problems.

Our lab explores the utility of farmer research networks (FRNs), underpinned by community-based participatory research, as a strategy for bottom-up agricultural innovation beginning at the grassroots. FRNs constitute an expansion of participatory research philosophy, enabling research functions and findings within specific communities to interact with and influence the knowledge and research in others, essentially reinforcing multilateral transmission of insights between local and global knowledge systems, and various nodes in between.

The dynamic nature of participatory research in the context of FRNs leads to “the capacity to answer questions, adapt technologies and solve problems, [serving] as valuable social infrastructure, enabling rural people to meet dynamic market opportunities and to cope with challenges like climate variability and change” (Nelson et al., 2019).

 The McKnight Foundation Collaborative Crop Research Program (CCRP), of which Rebecca is the Scientific Director, has been committed to the idea and practice of FRNs for nearly a decade. To date, our FRN-aligned projects have been centered around participatory mycotoxin surveillance and intervention in Indian village food systems, undertaken by Anthony Wenndt (PhD, 2020) in partnership with the Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition. This work has elucidated a framework for participatory mycotoxin management and shed light on the nuanced priorities and paths to innovation within and among Indian farmer communities.