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Common bean in Tanzania

Edith Kadege, Tanzania Research Institute (TARI)

  1. Why did you use tricot?

I used tricot for my PhD to understand farmers preference traits of common bean varieties in Tanzania. There are other methods available, like participatory varietal selection, but tricot offers several advantages over other methods. Tricot is simple for farmers to use and can involve many farmers across diverse environments. This leads to more accurate and diverse assessments. The ranking of data makes it easier to get meaningful insights from relatively few trials. Tricot is a less intensive approach, requiring less time and effort by farmers, leading to higher farmer participation and lower farmer dropout rates. It also requires fewer resources including time, materials and personnel, making it a very cost-effective method for evaluating agricultural varieties and technologies. It also reduces errors created with other methods when the farmers and researchers came together to evaluate the material. In those cases, some traits are not considered and there can be bias when farmers are influenced by the view of other farmers.

  1. What lessons did you learn using tricot?

Firstly, I learned that with tricot I could get instant data through ODK and identify errors during the trial. Secondly, I realized that because it is an inclusive approach, the farmers are already familiar with the varieties when they are released and this helps the adoption rate.

  1. What new insights about beans did you get from the trials?

Tricot helped us realize the significance of anthracnose disease of common bean and that the disease infection rate varied across different agroecological zones. This highlighted the need for disease intervention. The most important traits for farmers were high yield, market acceptance and disease resistance, but in addition, we found out that cooking with banana and intercropping bean with other crops were new considerations for bean breeders. This shows the importance of integrating cultural and variety preferences. Tricot also identified gender specific preferences. For instance, women prioritized post-harvest traits, men prioritized agronomic traits and youth prioritized marketability. Therefore, breeders should first identify who the consumers are in terms of gender and cultural traits in order to increase variety adoption rates.

  1. What advice do you have for someone who wants to use tricot?

Tricot is simple, useful and low cost and it can involve large numbers of farmers. In addition, post-trial adoption rates are high because so many farmers already have tested many of the varieties. Future research in Africa and other countries should use tricot to promote new varieties to improve crop productivity, nutrition and income.

  1. Do you think the tricot approach is appropriate for variety evaluation and release? Yes, it is good for variety evaluation and release because it is simple, useful and low cost. It engages many farmers in different environments. It provides enough data to determine that a particular variety is high performing.

  2. What are the challenges that need to be addressed?

ClimMob could be more user friendly. For us, it was harder to collect quantitative data such as disease infection levels and it is not easy to incorporate supplementary data into the platform. Breeders want to know more than just qualitative data. They are interested in the quantitative data that backs the farmers decision, e.g. how much is high yield?