Resources and Budgeting
Resources and Budgeting
- Required materials (e.g., seeds, observation tools, digital platforms).
Which visual materials are needed?
At www.climmob.net you will find examples and illustrations to help you generate your own visual materials. In order to explain the process to your tricot farmers and to facilitate the data collection, the following materials can support you:
• Informative leaflet or poster, as an aid to explain the tricot process to the farmers. • Observation card, for the farmers to collect their observations on the field. It is designed to enable participation with a minimal level of literacy.
- Time and financial planning.
Scaling: Cost reduction and new buisness models (RTB) - not sure if this goes on this page?
An important benefit of tricot is the possible reduction of trial costs, which could drive its adoption across different organizations, apart from the improved insights that it produces. Precise cost comparisons are difficult as there is no gold standard to compare with. Both ‘conventional’ participatory variety selection and tricot can be implemented in different ways. If both are implemented in a very intensive way (organizing farmer groups, meetings, working with RTB seed materials), the cost reduction is estimated to be roughly 40%. At the other extreme, a tenfold cost reduction is possible in the US, where farmers receive seeds by mail and are connected by smartphones. One reason for cost reduction is that some costs are externalized to farmers who volunteer to execute mini-trials using their own labor, land and inputs. This raises the question whether farmers’ motivation to participate is sufficiently enhanced by tricot to justify this investment. Previous studies showed that farmers’ motivation to participate in tricot is mainly related to access to seeds and information (Beza et al., 2017). Cost and motivation analyses are underway and should be available for Rwanda and Ghana in 2021.
Further cost reductions are possible if farmer networks are maintained over time, if they are serviced through channels that are also used for other means (credit provision, for example), and if they can reach economies of scale by testing varieties and other options for multiple crops. Tricot would make it possible for breeders and agronomists to ‘outsource’ trials to farmer-facing organizations. Alternative business models have already been introduced in the US context by organizations such as the Farmer Business Network, FIRST (Farmers’ Independent Research of Seed Technologies), and SeedLinked. The latter uses the tricot approach for its trials. The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT is exploring alternative business models following this trend focusing on the global South. Research is ongoing within RTB to determine the best scaling strategies for Rwanda and Ghana.