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Joining smallholder farmers’ traditional knowledge with metric traits to select better varieties of Ethiopian wheat

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Title Joining smallholder farmers’ traditional knowledge with metric traits to select better varieties of Ethiopian wheat
 
Creator Mancini, C.
Mengistu, D.K.
Pè, M.E.
Fadda, Carlo
Dell'Acqua, M.
Melfa and Workaye Farmer Community
Kidane, Yosef Gebrehawaryat
 
Subject smallholders
climate change
participatory approaches
wheat
indigenous knowledge
plant breeding
plant genetics
 
Description An Erratum to this article was published on 12 October 2017: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-12288-5
Smallholder farming communities face highly variable climatic conditions that threaten locally adapted, low-input agriculture. The benefits of modern crop breeding may fail to reach their fields when broadly adapted genetic materials do not address local requirements. To date, participatory methods only scratched the surface of the exploitability of farmers’ traditional knowledge in
breeding. In this study, 30 smallholder farmers in each of two locations in Ethiopia provided quantitative evaluations of earliness, spike morphology, tillering capacity and overall quality on 400 wheat genotypes, mostly traditional varieties, yielding altogether 192,000 data points. Metric measurements of ten agronomic traits were simultaneously collected, allowing to systematically
break down farmers’ preferences on quantitative phenotypes. Results showed that the relative importance of wheat traits differed by gender and location. Farmer traits were variously contributed by metric traits, and could only partially be explained by them. Eventually, farmer trait values were used to produce a ranking of the 400 wheat varieties identifying the trait combinations most desired by farmers.

The study scale and methods lead to a better understanding of the quantitative basis of Ethiopian smallholder farmer preference in wheat, broadening the discussion for the future of local, sustainable breeding efforts accommodating farmers’ knowledge.
 
Date 2017
2017-09-13T07:50:35Z
2017-09-13T07:50:35Z
 
Type Journal Article
 
Identifier Mancini, C.; Kidane, Y.G.; Mengistu, D.K.; Pè, M.E.; Fadda, C.; Dell’Acqua, M.; Melfa and Workaye Farmer Community (2017) Joining smallholder farmers’ traditional knowledge with metric traits to select better varieties of Ethiopian wheat. Scientific Reports 7, Article number: 9120 ISSN: 2045-2322
2045-2322
https://hdl.handle.net/10568/83491
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-07628-4
 
Language en
 
Rights CC-BY-4.0
Open Access
 
Format Article number: 9120
application/pdf
 
Publisher Springer
 
Source Scientific Reports