Farmers, Scientists and Plant Breeding Integrating Knowledge and Practice

About this book

Contains 12 contributions, most of which discuss cases in the developing world. The purpose of the book is to examine the nature of and relationship between the knowledge of farmers and of scientists, and how these can be best integrated in plant breeding.

Contents

Part I Farmer plant breeders and collaboration: understanding farmers' knowledge as the basis for collaboration with plant breeders; methodological development and examples from ongoing research in Mexico, Syria, Cuba, and Nepal; economics perspectives on collaborative plant breeding for conservation of genetic diversity on farm; social and agroecological variability of seed production and the potential collaborative breeding of potatoes in the Andean countries; farmers' views and management of sorghum diversity in western Hareghe, Ethiopia - implications for collaboration with formal breeding; how farmer-scientist cooperation is devalued and revalued - a Philippine example. Part II Scientific plant breeders - the formative years of cereal breeding and public seed in Switzerland; theory, empiricism and intuition in professional plant breeding; conceptual changes in Cuban plant breeding in response to a national socioeconomic crisis - the example of pumpkins; participatory plant breeding in rice in Nepal; collaborative maize variety development for stress-prone environments in southern Africa; plant breeding with farmers requires testing the assumptions of conventional plant breeding - lessons from the ICARDA barley program. (Part contents).

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