Jacob van Etten

• PhD
• Principal Scientist and Research Director at Alliance of Bioversity & CIAT

The Green Revolution still exerts an important influence on agricultural policy as a technology-centred development strategy. A main policy narrative underpinning the Green Revolution was first expounded in Transforming Traditional Agriculture (TTA), a book published in 1964 by Nobel Prize-winning economist Ted Schultz. He famously argued that trad...

This is the preprint of a key note contribution to Proceedings of the First International Conference on Farmer-centric On-Farm Experimentation - Digital tools for a Scalable Transformative Pathway. This conference was organised by INRAE - #DigitAg and the ISPA OFE-C (International Society of Precision Agriculture, On-Farm Experimentation Communi...

Crop adaptation to climate change requires accelerated crop variety introduction accompanied by recommendations to help farmers match the best variety with their field contexts. Existing approaches to generate these recommendations lack scalability and predictivity in marginal production environments. We tested if crowdsourced citizen science can a...

Agricultural extension in the Global South can benefit greatly from the use of modern information and communication technologies (ICT). Yet, despite two decades of promising experiences, this potential is not fully realized. Here, we review the relevant research literature to inform future investments into agricultural information services that har...

CONTEXT Innovation based on information and communication technology (ICT) plays an increasingly important role in agricultural research-for-development efforts. It has been recognized, however, that the weak adoption and low impact of many ICT-for-agriculture (ICT4Ag) efforts are partly due to poor design. Often, design was driven more by technolo...

CONTEXT: Opportunity crops, also known as neglected and underutilized species (NUS), offer benefits to diversify food systems with nutritious and climate-resilient foods. A major limitation to incorporate these crops in farming systems is the lack of improved varieties impedes farmers accessing quality planting material of these crops. OBJECTIVES:...

The triadic comparison of technology options (tricot) approach to participatory varietal selection has been demonstrated to scale out the on‐farm testing of elite candidate crop varieties. In this study, we evaluated elite clones of cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) using the tricot approach. We sought to (1) synthesize on‐farm trial data from two...

• Inclusivity of digital interventions is challenged by digital divides, harmful side-effects, and conceptual unclarity • The digital development community should agree on transparent, standardized procedures for assessing inclusivity • Researchers need simple, hands-on methods to actively consider inclusivity during design of interventions • Inclu...

Participatory approaches for crop variety testing can help breeding teams to incorporate traditional knowledge and consider site-specific sociocultural complexities. However, traditional participatory approaches have drawbacks and are seldom streamlined or scaled. Decentralized on-farm testing supported by citizen science addresses some of these ch...

The triadic comparison of technologies (tricot) method is a participatory, citizen science method for evaluating a number of technologies (e.g. varieties) in groups of three, with analysis based on ranking. The tricot method is supported by the ClimMob platform (ClimMob.net) which enables the design of on-farm experiments, collection of data (using...

Experimental citizen science offers new ways to organize on-farm testing of crop varieties and other agronomic options. Its implementation at scale requires software that streamlines the process of experimental design, data collection and analysis, so that different organizations can support trials. This article considers ClimMob software developed...

• Traders of grain and informal seed in Tanzania have limited experience with internet-enabled services, but 96 % own a mobile phone. Besides phone calls, digital services play no significant role in business activities, however. • Traders rely primarily on verbal communication with other traders for important information, including market prices,...

Matching crop varieties to their target use context and user preferences is a challenge faced by many plant breeding programs serving smallholder agriculture. Numerous participatory approaches proposed by CGIAR and other research teams over the last four decades have attempted to capture farmers' priorities/preferences and crop variety field perfor...

Enhancing food security for smallholder farmers amidst challenging climatic conditions requires accurate quantification of agricultural production. However, there are increasing debates on the weaknesses of commonly used yield estimation approaches in smallholder production systems. There is also a limited understanding of the implications of metho...

Synthesis of crop trial data can generate insights that are not available from the analysis of individual studies, but such synthesis is often constrained by the heterogeneity of data among studies. Rank‐based data synthesis provides the flexibility to combine data of heterogeneous types and from different sources. We demonstrate the application of...

To cope with interannual climate variability, many farmers in tropical and sub-tropical regions choose crop varieties that fit seasonal climate conditions. Therefore, seed demand for different varieties, such as early- or late-maturing cultivars, varies between years. Resulting mismatches between relatively constant supply and variable demand creat...

BACKGROUND Nigeria and Cameroon are multi‐ethnic countries with diverse preferences for food characteristics. The present study aimed to inform cassava breeders on consumer‐prioritized eba quality traits. Consumer testing was carried out using the triadic comparison of technologies (tricot). Diverse consumers in villages, towns and cities evaluated...

To derive insights from data, researchers working on agricultural experiments need appropriate data management and analysis tools. To ensure that workflows are reproducible and can be applied on a routine basis, programmatic tools are needed. Such tools are increasingly necessary for rank-based data, a type of data that is generated in on-farm expe...

Accessible, high-quality seed is vital to the agricultural, food, and nutrition sovereignty needed for justice-based sustainable development. Multiregion, interdisciplinary research on farmers' seed systems (FSS) can complement case-based and thematic approaches.This study's goals are to (1) provide a synthetic overview of current major FSS concept...

This perspective describes the opportunities and challenges of data-driven approaches for crop diversity management (genebanks and breeding) in the context of agricultural research for sustainable development in the Global South. Data-driven approaches build on larger volumes of data and flexible analyses that link different datasets across domains...

This Initiative aims to maximize CGIAR and partners' returns on investment in breeding, seed systems and other Initiatives based on reliable and timely market intelligence that enables stronger demand orientation and strengthens co-ownership and co-implementation by CGIAR and partners. Abstract The current seed product market segmentation by the Co...

User-oriented research is important in breeding improved genotypes, for developing and validating product concepts (mostly involving trait prioritisation), as well as evaluating breeding products in use situations (mostly involving participatory variety evaluation). This paper examines key aspects that enable cumulative learning in user-oriented re...

Agrometeorological data is important in agricultural research, especially in agronomy and crop science, for investigating genotype by environment interactions. The AgERA5 dataset from the Copernicus Climate Data Store provides free and public access to global gridded daily agrometeorological data, from 1979 to present, with ready to use variables t...

Location‐specific information is required to support decision making in crop variety management, especially under increasingly challenging climate conditions. Data synthesis can aggregate data from individual trials to produce information that supports decision making in plant breeding programs, extension services, and of farmers. Data from on‐farm...

Scaling of innovations is a key requirement for addressing societal challenges in sectors such as agriculture. Research for development (R4D) programs, projects and other interventions struggle to make innovations go to scale. Current conceptualizations of scaling are often too simplistic and narrow, and more systemic and multidimensional perspecti...

Between early 2019 and end of 2020 two CGIAR-RTB funded scaling projects employed the Scaling Readiness approach to guide their overall scaling activities and decisions. Scaling approach for flash drying of cassava starch and flour at small scale is a two-year scaling project that aimed at improving cassava processing at small-scale through gains i...

Scaling of innovations is a key requirement for addressing societal challenges in sectors such as agriculture, but research for development programs struggles to make innovations go to scale . There is a gap between new complexity-aware scientific theories and perspectives on innovation and practical approaches that can improve strategic and operat...

There is evidence that in many situations the use of a diverse set of two or more crop varieties in the field has benefits for production. The benefits of varietal diversification include lower crop disease incidence, higher productivity, and lower yield variability. Targeted interventions could increase varietal diversity where smallholder farmers...

Crop breeding must embrace the broad diversity of smallholder agricultural systems to ensure food security to the hundreds of millions of people living in challenging production environments. This need can be addressed by combining genomics, farmers’ knowledge, and environmental analysis into a data-driven decentralized approach (3D-breeding). We t...

The CGIAR crop improvement (CI) programs, unlike commercial CI programs, which are mainly geared to profit though meeting farmers' needs, are charged with meeting multiple objectives with target populations that include both farmers and the community at large. We compiled the opinions from more than thirty experts in the private and public sector o...

One CGIAR set ambitious targets for reforming the CGIAR system 1. In the last year alone, CGIAR has sharpened its mission and unified under single governance. It has made significant progress in institutional integration, designing common policies and services. It started developing a unified country and regional presence, new research modalities f...

Crowdsourced citizen science is an emerging approach in plant sciences. The triadic comparison of technologies (tricot) approach has been successfully utilized by demand-led breeding programmes to identify varieties for dissemination suited to specific geographic and climatic regions. An important feature of this approach is the independent way in...

Input subsidies are a popular redistributive policy measure in many developing countries to support climate change adaptation through yield stabilization and food security in a small-farm context. Nevertheless, the evidence of the effectiveness of the programs is mixed. One main point of critique is that these programs are vulnerable to political i...

Tricot (triadic comparisons of technologies) is a citizen science approach for testing technology options in their use environments, which is being applied to on-farm testing of crop varieties. Over the last years, important progress has been made on the tricot methodology of which an overview is given. Trial dimensions depend on several factors bu...

COVID-19 brings new challenges worldwide, including to smallholder farmers and their seed systems. In response, an escalating number of seed projects are being planned to deliver immediate aid or to alter current seed production programs. A Statement, prepared by diverse seed system experts, aims to steer both the immediate aid (next 1–2 seasons) a...

Climate extremes are one of the main drivers of acute food insecurity. In Guatemala, acute food insecurity reaches alarming levels when the usual dry period during the bimodal rainy seasons is extended or starts earlier than expected. Drought has a slow-onset which theoretically leaves sufficient lead-time for addressing impacts on food security. I...

Triadic comparison of technology options (tricot) is a research methodology that helps farmers to identify the most suitable technologies for the local conditions of their farm. Tricot (read: ‘try-cot’) engages farmers as ‘farmer researchers’ in the testing or validation of new crop varieties and other promising technologies. Tricot is supported by...

In response to the climate change, it is essential to provide smallholder farmers with improved field crop genotypes that may increase the resilience of their farming system. This requires a fast turnover of varieties in a system capable of injecting significant amounts of genetic diversity into productive landscapes. Crop improvement is a pivotal...

Participatory research can improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and scope of research processes, and foster social inclusion, empowerment and sustainability. Yet despite four decades of agricultural research institutions exploring and developing methods for participatory research, it has never become mainstream in the agricultural technology deve...

This paper presents the R package PlackettLuce, which implements a generalization of the Plackett–Luce model for rankings data. The generalization accommodates both ties (of arbitrary order) and partial rankings (complete rankings of subsets of items). By default, the implementation adds a set of pseudo-comparisons with a hypothetical item, ensurin...

Crop varieties should fulfill multiple requirements, including agronomic performance and product quality. Variety evaluations depend on data generated from field trials and sensory analyses, performed with different levels of participation from farmers and consumers. Such multi-faceted variety evaluation is expensive and time-consuming; hence, any...

The chirps package provides functionalities for reproducible analysis in R (R Core Team, 2020) using the CHIRPS (Funk et al., 2015) data. CHIRPS is daily precipitation data set developed by the Climate Hazards Group (Funk et al., 2015) for high resolution precipitation gridded data. Spanning 50 • S to 50 • N (and all longitudes) and ranging from 19...

Participatory projects supporting the farmer-based seed management of agrobiodiverse varieties including landraces have proliferated globally in response to nutritional insecurity and climate change. This research examines the agroecological landscape knowledge of farmers in a recent participatory seed project using the tricot approach in Central A...

Supports analysis of trends in climate change, ecological and crop modelling. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=climatrends

En esta investigación se analizaron las causas sociales, ambientales y económicas que inciden en la pérdida de agrobiodiversidad de las chagras del pueblo indígena Inga en la Amazonía colombiana. Se usó una metodología cualitativa basada en entrevistas semiestructuradas, grupos focales y asambleas para validación de información. Los resultados mues...

Community seed banks (CSBs) are initiatives to support the conservation and use of diverse crops though locally rooted collective action. The impact of CSBs is assumed to be complex, but has not been investigated in detail. Our study addresses this gap by analysing the impact of CSBs using social-ecological resilience as theoretical framework. We f...

API client for 'ClimMob', an open source software for crowdsourcing citizen science in agriculture under the 'tricot' method <https://climmob.net/climmob3/>. Developed by van Etten et al. (2019) <doi:10.1017/S0014479716000739>, it turns the research paradigm on its head; instead of a few researchers designing complicated trials to compare several t...

The Rural Household Multiple Indicator Survey (RHoMIS) is a standardized farm household survey approach which collects information on 758 variables covering household demographics, farm area, crops grown and their production, livestock holdings and their production, agricultural product use and variables underlying standard socioeconomic and food s...

Sustainable intensification (SI) is promoted as a rural development paradigm for sub- Saharan Africa. Achieving SI requires smallholder farmers to have access to information that is context-specific, increases their decision-making capacities, and adapts to changing environments. Current extension services often struggle to address these needs. New...

How to develop digital services that address real problems and get adopted: Include smallholder farmers and extension agents in your design team.

Using digital dissemination tools, extension services can more easily report on achievement of targets ··· Planners can use farmers‘ digital feedback to adapt planning of activities to local needs ··· Policy-makers can review the work of extension services based on data from the ground

Extension officers need digital literacy training to make good use of new digital tools ··· Public institutions should increase cooperation with the private sector ··· Policy-makers should ensure low-cost mobile communication so far-mers will fully use existing services

Replacing animal proteins with plant proteins in diets has been demonstrated to have both health and environmental advantages, driving a debate about the potential of protein-rich crops as dietary replacements for animal products. However, there is a lack of knowledge on how climate change could influence the potential for producing protein-rich cr...

Increased interannual climate variability affects agricultural livelihoods throughout the world. In many regions, climate services support decision-makers in their adaptation efforts. The range of these services and the number of associated information products have increased dramatically in recent years. However, the relationships between these pr...

Good access to resources and opportunities is essential for sustainable development. Improving access, especially in rural areas, requires useful measures of current access to the locations where these resources and opportunities are found. Recent work has developed a global map of travel times to cities with more than 50,000 people in the year 201...

Our understanding of food security in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has been hampered by limitations in the temporal and spatial representativeness of data. Food balance sheets provide scalable estimates of per capita food availability, but fail to represent food access, stability and their causal linkages. In contrast, rural household surveys represent...

n Guatemala, seasonal acute food insecurity related to extended dry periods is a recurrent phenomenon. Public response is often too late and ineffective. One principal obstacle for decision-makers lays in the absence of timely, reliable and relevant information at the right scale. The impact of drought on the ground depends on different socio-econo...

Eradicating hunger is a complex and multifaceted challenge, requiring evidence bases that can inform wide scale action, but that are also participatory and grounded to have local relevance and effectiveness. The Rural Household Multi-Indicator Surveys (RHoMIS) provides a broad assessment of household capabilities and food security outcomes, while e...

Voice audio service rapidly gives farmers the information they need through their mobile phones

In recent years, agricultural extension services in developing countries have increasingly introduced modern information and communication technologies (ICT) to deliver advice. But to realize efficiency gains, digital applications may need to address heterogeneous information needs by targeting agricultural advisory contents in a household-specific...

Under accelerated climatic and socioeconomic change, farmers need quick solutions, including access to a range of crop seeds. Seeds for Needs provides a simple, cost-efficient way for a diversity of farmers to (i) have access to a broad range of crop diversity (ii) characterize it using molecular, morphological and farmer evaluation data, (iii) eva...

Experts discuss the challenges faced in agrobiodiversity and conservation, integrating disciplines that range from plant and biological sciences to economics and political science. Wide-ranging environmental phenomena—including climate change, extreme weather events, and soil and water availability—combine with such socioeconomic factors as food po...

Experts discuss the challenges faced in agrobiodiversity and conservation, integrating disciplines that range from plant and biological sciences to economics and political science. Wide-ranging environmental phenomena—including climate change, extreme weather events, and soil and water availability—combine with such socioeconomic factors as food po...

Agricultural development must integrate multiple objectives at the same time, including food security, income, and environmental sustainability. To help achieve these objectives, development practitioners need to prioritize concrete livelihood practices to promote to rural households. But trade-offs between objectives can lead to dilemmas in select...

Household-type specific formulae for calculation of a gender equity indicator from RHoMIS data. (DOCX)

Positive deviant interview guideline. (DOCX)

RHoMIS survey data of 521 rural households in Tanzania. Households and locations have been anonymized. Units can be found in Table 1. (XLSX)

Calculation of household endowments in six resources that may drive different adoption potentials for novel practices and technologies. (DOCX)

Harvard Dataverse <https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/4ICF6W>. Farmers were invited to collaborate as citizen science volunteers in the crowdsourcing approach "tricot" (triadic comparison of technologies). We organized tricot trials, testing 10 common bean varieties (Phaseolus vulgaris) in Nicaragua during five growing seasons, 62 durum wheat (Triticum du...

While the commercialization and diversification of agricultural and livestock systems have been identified as key global strategies for climate change adaptation and mitigation, less is known as to the large-scale gendered impacts that are implicated in these transformations among smallholder crop and livestock farmers. This study explores these ge...

Diversification is an important strategy for managing risk in agricultural systems. Risk analysis can help to support farmers’ diversification strategies, but existing analytical methods are complicated and little used. The minimum regret model helps to fill this gap. It provides a simple, transparent calculation procedure that can be executed with...

How a group relates to agrobiodiversity differs greatly within and between user groups. This chapter explores the socioecological changes that are driven globally by migration and urbanization, agrarian change (de- and reagrarianization), market pressures, and climate. It introduces the concepts of intentionality by default and conscious intentiona...

Drills are an important element of disaster management, helping to increase preparedness and reduce the risk of real-time failure. Yet they are not systematically applied to slow-onset disasters such as drought, which cause damage that is not immediately apparent and thus do not solicit immediate action. This case study evaluates how drills inform...

Crop varieties play an important role in climate adaptation, allowing farmers to adjust the varieties they use to suit new climate conditions. Several barriers stand in the way of this approach. First, variety recommendations are often based on data from trials done at research stations, which do not reflect performance in low-input agriculture. Se...

Drills are an important element of disaster management, helping to increase preparedness and reduce the risk of real-time failure. Yet, they are not applied systematically to slow-onset disasters such as a drought, which causes damage that is not instantly apparent and thus does not solicit immediate action. This case study evaluates how drills inf...

This paper presents the R package PlackettLuce, which implements a generalization of the Plackett-Luce model for rankings data. The generalization accommodates both ties (of any order) and partial rankings (rankings of only some items). By default, the implementation adds a set of pseudo-comparisons with a hypothetical item, ensuring that the netwo...

This study examined how crop-specific agricultural research investments can be prioritised to anticipate climate change impact on crops and to enable the production of more nutritious food. We used a simple crop modelling approach to derive expected future changes in regional climate suitability for crops. To determine if different starch-rich and...

Modern information and communication technologies (ICT) have been introduced to agricultural extension systems in the last years. But many applications follow a top-down transfer-of-technology approach. Local, temporal and farming system-specific adaptation of information is difficult, often leading to limited impacts on farmers' decision-making. I...