Speaker
Description
1. Introduction
There is a growing interest among farmers and consumers for grain legumes in Sweden and potential in increasing their production and consumption (Röös et al., 2020). This requires better knowledge among farmers and advisors about suitable species, varieties and management practices for different conditions. Since cultivar suitability and management practices including postharvest handling are highly farm-specific, farmers need to gain their own experience (Cristofari et al., 2018). Synergies between the ways of learning of scientists and farmers are highly relevant in this regard. We analysed on-farm experiments designed, managed and evaluated in a collaboration between farmers and researchers. We focus on what farmers and researchers gained from the project and how to facilitate this type of collaboration.
2. Materials and methods
Farmers in southern Sweden were invited by researchers to form a group in a project aiming to increase cultivation of grain legumes for food. Farmers and researchers collaborated on the definition of the design, management and evaluation of experiments. Fifteen on-farm experiments were performed in 2018 and 2019. Researchers performed measurements on the experiments and organised semi-structured interviews and a workshop to present and discuss the experiments. The researchers collected data on farmers’ perceptions of the overall collaboration and critical reflections on the learning process. Data from communications, meetings and field notes were summarised under themes adapted from the framework for farmers’ experiments developed by Catalogna et al (2018).
3. Results and discussion
The farmer-researcher collaboration generated practical knowledge on crop management, strategic knowledge on economic sustainability and knowledge about joint learning.
The experiments on new or relatively new grain legume species like lentil and grey pea often combined several aims related to agronomy: learning about the crop’s growth cycle and potential difficulties, testing intercropping and comparing varieties. With relatively well-known crops like fava bean and yellow pea, the experiments focused on establishment methods and weed control or on establishing a relationship with a retailer for human consumption. We identified multiannual experimental itineraries (Catalogna et al., 2022). Several farmers tested more than one novel practice at a time.
Grain postharvest handling steps such as cleaning and selling were considered by farmers to be integral components of the experiments, especially in relation to trying a new crop or testing the impact of a new practice on postharvest handling (e.g., intercropping). The farmers considered one of the main benefits of on-farm experiments compared to researchers’ typical on-station experiments to be their larger scale and the possibility to have a holistic approach, assessing feasibility of all steps from accessing seeds to selling products.
The experiments provided site-specific knowledge that was also often relevant to other farmers in the group. Using a collective setting to evaluate experiments accelerated the learning process and stimulated interest in new crops and new practices, leading to new experiments. The on-farm experiments combined advantages of ‘pure’ farmer experiments and ‘pure’ researcher experiments (Hansson, 2019), facilitating deeper analysis and understanding of outcomes. The farmers stated that working with researchers and with their peers increased their motivation to test innovative practices and that the external analytical view of researchers had been instrumental for extracting additional knowledge and deriving alternative conclusions. Farmer–researcher collaborations using on-farm experiments can enhance collective learning by combining complementary perspectives throughout the experimentation process.
References
Catalogna, M., Dubois, M., Navarrete, M., 2018. Diversity of experimentation by farmers engaged in agroecology. Agron. Sustain. Dev. 38, 50. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13593-018-0526-2
Catalogna, M., Dunilac Dubois, M., Navarrete, M., 2022. Multi-annual experimental itinerary: an analytical framework to better understand how farmers experiment agroecological practices. Agron. Sustain. Dev. 42, 20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13593-022-00758-8
Cristofari, H., Girard, N., Magda, D., 2018. How agroecological farmers develop their own practices: a framework to describe their learning processes. Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems 42, 777–795. https://doi.org/10.1080/21683565.2018.1448032
Hansson, S.O., 2019. Farmers’ experiments and scientific methodology. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 9, 32. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-019-0255-7
Röös, E., Carlsson, G., Ferawati, F., Hefni, M., Stephan, A., Tidåker, P., Witthöft, C., 2020. Less meat, more legumes: prospects and challenges in the transition toward sustainable diets in Sweden. Renew. Agric. Food Syst. 35, 192–205. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742170518000443
| Keywords | on-farm experiments ; grain legumes ; postharvest handling ; participatory research |
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