1000FARMS is an institutional platform of NARES/CGIAR breeding networks whose purpose is to magnify their effectiveness and impact by enabling them to generate sufficient on-farm data and product insights on late-stage maize breeding selection candidates and new releases to ensure they will be high-performing in the hands of farmers, are farmer-preferred and climate-adapted, and can be recommended for scaling by the seed system. The platform achieves this by integrating three primary components:
- tricot, or triadic comparison of technology options, a research methodology that helps farmers to identify the most suitable technologies for the local conditions of their farm, engaging them in the testing or validation of new crop varieties and other promising technologies.
- ClimMob, a digital public software package developed by the Alliance of Bioversity-CIAT that allows farmers and field agents to record crowdsourced data, such as variety preferences, notes on performance, images, and gender/socio-economic data.
- An on-farm trial (OFT) community of practice embedded in the NARES/CGIAR Breeding Networks in Africa.
These tools and methodologies already exist and have been well-tested; the innovation of 1000FARMS is to put all three components together to accelerate the uptake of the OFT approach across CGIAR and NARES breeding networks.
Objectives:
- Expand and improve OFT tools to enable streamlined workflows and extract more insights from OFT data.
- Implement appropriately scaled on-farm testing programs in partnership with at least 20 NARES/CG crop breeding networks.
