Soil infertility is a major constraint to food production in the communal areas of Zimbabwe. Smalholders in the region recognize the problems of low soil fertility and have devised ways of coping with them. This study ...

Identifying the appropriate germplasm to be improved is a key component of any participatory breeding effort because of its implications for impacts on social welfare and genetic diversity. This paper describes a method ...

Interest is increasing worldwide in on-farm conservation as a component of a strategy to conserve crop genetic resources. On-farm conservation may require outside support to small-scale farmers in areas of crop domestication ...

This paper describes the current state of international plant breeding research and explains why centralized approach to germplasm improvement, so successful in the past, is being transformed by decentralized local breeding ...

En este manual se describen métodos que permiten la evaluación conjunta de tecnologías por parte de científicos agrícolas y agricultores. Estos métodos fueron creados especificamente para la investigación participativa ...

This manual presents methods that enable agricultural scientist and farmers to evaluate technologies/practices jointly. The methods are specifically designed for participatory research on germplasm and soil fertility ...

Descriptive data from the sample survey of households in the study communities enable us to profile the characteristics of: (1) farm households; (2) the maize populations they grow, based on their own descriptors and the ...

This study uses an approach derived from models of the private and public characteristics of goods to illustrate (1) the overriding importance of variety attributes in farmers' decisions to allocate area among varieties ...

Soil infertility is a major constraint to food production in the communal areas of Zimbabwe. Smallholders in the region recognise the problems of low soil fertility and have devised ways of coping with them. This study ...