For over a decade, farmers around the world have been working hand in hand with researchers from the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT and their partners to develop better ways to test new crop varieties and improve food security in their communities.

Food insecurity is increasing worldwide. In 2022, 345 million people in 82 countries will suffer from acute food insecurity. It is therefore more important than ever to test and bring to market new crop varieties that are adapted to changing local conditions and meet local needs and opportunities.

But it has not always been so easy to bring farmers and agricultural researchers on the same page: not so long ago, most crop varieties and other technologies were tested in large-scale field trials under generic conditions. This meant that little attention was paid to the impact of weather conditions on crop yields, and there was little interest or involvement from farmers.

Jacob van Etten, chief scientist and director of digital inclusion, explains that Tricot (an acronym for Triadic Comparison of Technologies) was originally developed to provide a more collaborative focus on citizen science, testing new crop varieties directly in farmers’ fields, in the same context in which they will hopefully be grown after the study.

“It’s the interaction between people and technology that drives innovation,” he says. “We’re still doing methodological research to figure out how to design trials to get what farmers want.”

From citizen science to agricultural cooperation

Brazilian scientist Kauê de Sousa, a researcher at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, began working with Tricot in 2016 as a data analyst for the first dataset generated in India.

“Tricot has helped put farmers’ fields at the center of agricultural experiments: unlike previous approaches, farmers do not evaluate or comment on someone else’s plot, but on their own small plot,” says de Sousa. “This encourages collaboration and makes communication more interesting, not only for farmers and researchers, but for the entire community.”

A 2024 study involved hundreds of smallholder farmers from 140 villages in the Trifinio region of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Tricot was evaluated; a group-based participatory approach to variety testing and a control approach were used to assess the effectiveness of the different approaches.

The study’s lead author, Martina Occelli, explains that the researchers found that national programs can benefit from the low-cost, equitable, externally valid and scalable nature of the citizen science on-farm testing approach to inform breeding programs.

“For on-farm testing, a citizen science approach with on-farm testing should be used. Group-based training in agronomy could be offered separately, for example to farmers who have already completed a round of on-farm citizen science testing,” she says, adding that a hybrid approach would result in fewer farmers abandoning trials and increase the value of the data.

“Farmers would also benefit from a group-based training approach,” she says.

New benefits of agricultural research

Van Etten explains that Tricot is now mature enough to think about how researchers can organize networks of farmers in a way that allows experiences to be scaled and built upon, with farmers more at the center.

“We are still researching the methodology to find out how we can design trials so that farmers achieve what they hope for,” says van Etten. He adds that more farmer-led research could help shape the technological direction of agricultural research.

“That doesn’t mean it’s a controversial idea. It’s more about how to reconcile different innovations with farmers.”

In another 2024 paper, “The Tricot approach: An agile framework for decentralized on-farm testing supported by citizen science. A retrospective,” de Sousa, van Etten and their co-authors explain that there are still important issues to be addressed, from how to maintain enthusiasm, skills and funding in the scientific, technical and agricultural communities to making Tricot participants more representative of gender and other socioeconomic diversity in farming communities.

As more researchers and private extension networks around the world begin to use tricot fabrics, the benefits of farmer involvement are becoming more and more apparent.

A study conducted in Uganda in July 2024 showed that applying the Tricot method allowed researchers to take into account not only crop-specific information but also farmers’ culinary preferences (such as taste and cookability). The same researchers also examined the role of gender in crop preferences. The article was published in the journal Plant Sciences.