When "Best Practices" Aren't Good Enough: Testing New Cultivars, Inorganic Fertilizers, and Organic Amendments in Semi-Arid West Africa.

Agricultural management recommendations are often derived from highly controlled experiments and deductive assumptions of applicability, and prescribed to farmers as “best” practices, “improved” cultivars, and “proven” technologies. This top-down approach may be suitable in relatively well understood, homogeneous, and capital-intensive systems, but it can easily lead to inappropriate recommendations in the understudied, heterogeneous, and low-input systems that dominate smallholder production in sub-Saharan Africa. This study tested 18 integrated seed and soil management strategies for five rain fed crops through a network of over 250 farmer field trials in seven regions throughout Senegal and The Gambia. The harvest results identified a variety of reliable and broadly beneficial practices, and subsequent surveys of participating farmers documented a wide range in perceived value of these different adaptive options. The common management recommendation of using new cultivars with high levels of inorganic fertilizer was neither the most productive practical option nor the most highly valued strategy. Instead, farmers were clearly making individualized assessments of the available alternatives to match their perceived personal constraints and opportunities. Agricultural research should be re-orientated to better support such personalized farmer adaptation by emphasizing embedded field trials as a primary research method and by identifying multiple adaptive options rather than the specific practices that researchers presume to be “best.”