> Dale,
> If you want the results to be meaningful and used by farmers it needs to
> be conducted under real world conditions by an unbiased farmer. I don't
> know where you find that. I don't believe its possible to find any person
> without some kind of bias. I'd also suggest you put a feeding component
> into this trial. Lets give the true experts(pigs, sheep, cows, chickens,
> etc) a chance to decide which corn they prefer and grow better on.
> Best of luck,
Thats true enough. And in countries where grains are grown primarily for
consumption by human beings, it is they who take the decision to adopt.
One of the reasons why hybrid sorghum, and pearl millets in India have not
taken off is that people do not like them. Farmers across the main sorghum
and pearl millet regions in India uniformly hate hybrids, because they are
less tasty, harder to cook, they do not like the grain colour etc. Most
farmers I have spoken to who grow hybrids, sell it off in the market and
either buy traditional varieties or grow traditional in a small plot for
home consumption.
There are lots of other reasons why farmers may refuse to adopt hybrids,
and not all of them are directly economic. I remembr a study I was
involved in, where after several seasons of on farm trials, all farmers in
a couple of villages uniformly praised the high yield of a groundnut
variety, but everyone refused to adopt it for further trials. The real
reason it turned out was that women who did the shelling, influenced the
adoption decision, by saying that the new variety was very difficult to
shell!
I may not have followed the discussion properly, but I think conducting
tests under optimal conditions misses the whole point. Under the actual
conditions prevalent on farm, farmers may come to the conclusion, that
hybrids are too risky and low yielding and that is what influences the
adoption decision.
However, the whole experiment now looks pretty exciting, and it would be
interesting to know the results.
Regards
D.Parthasarathy
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology, Powai
Mumbai, 400076, India
Phone: 091 022 576 7372
email: dp@hss.iitb.ernet.in
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