Conserving crop diversity on farmRTB scientists are developing baselines of crop diversity and providing support to farmers who conserve vulnerable landraces. Baselines (of which varieties are grown and where) are necessary to identify vulnerable varieties and track their status. The baselines use citizen science to monitor crop diversity in farmers’ fields from gene to landscape. RTB scientists are standardizing procedures … Read More

Encouraging farmers to take collective action to manage plant diseaseFarmers may not be motivated to cooperate to manage a crop disease unless they understand how it spreads from one farm to another. Building avenues of cooperation, through apps and through local organizations, can also help motivate farmers to work together, as shown by an experience in Ethiopia.Farmer committee members checking … Read More

Modelling farming systems to optimize interventionsFarmDESIGN is a model that helps to find the right balance between income, nutrition and soil health. An innovative application of the model in combination with a forward-looking partial equilibrium multi-market economic model, IMPACT, allows for analyzing various scenarios of future drivers of change. Complex interactions between biophysical and socio-economic spheres are explored and drivers … Read More

The Scaling Fund: improving the scaling readiness of innovationsResearchers often face challenges as they translate their research into innovations for use at a large scale. Since 2018, the RTB Scaling Fund supported rooted apical cuttings (RAC) and seven other projects in Africa and Latin America to bring promising innovations into use. The projects used Scaling Readiness, a step-by-step approach to … Read More