SolACE OFE Presentation

Audio Transcript Auto-generated

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  Hello. My name is Emily magistrate Ali.

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  And I'm going to be talking about the conference publication

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  that was submitted out of the Solis project.

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  About what works and what doesn't work in horizon multi

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  active projects.

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  So the product in question is the Solis project.

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  It's had a major farmer participatory component in one of

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  its work package to do on farm trials of water

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  use, efficiency and nutrient use efficiency innovations.

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  The innovations that we looked at.

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  We're in potato bread, wheat and dermal and they included

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  a range that farmers could try.

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  Some that were you can suggested by farmers during the

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  project There were seven different farmer networks across Europe, the

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  UK France, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland, Hungary and Italy.

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  And they covered book organic and conventional management systems.

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  The way these networks were managed through the project was

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  from the work package lead and cast leaders.

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  And then within each country there were farmer network leads

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  were partners in the solos project worked in country directly

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  with farmers to more responsible for data collection and the

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  experimental design locally.

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  And then the participatory farmers themselves fed back directly to

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  the network leads.

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  You can participate in selecting trial innovations and also helped

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  data collection in many cases, the main focus of the

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  paper that's been submitted to the conference is about the

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  challenges and successes of this approach in the project so

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  challenges. First recruitment is difficult depending on pre established connections

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  within each farmer network.

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  So some networks were a bit slower to start in

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  on farm trials and others and then innovation selection because

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  it was a top down approach of innovations opposed by

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  research consortium.

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  Not all the innovations were of interest two farmers.

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  So some are considered innovative brain makings and rotation, for

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  example, or these farmers have been doing for a while.

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  Someone presented not effective based on experience with previous trials

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  and milling about them.

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  Some farmers most typical of microbial, not violence, for example,

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  and some were not of interest.

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  Some farmers came into these network discussions, wanted to trial

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  pests and disease control that this wasn't included in the

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  purview of the overall solis Prada.

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  Organic farmers also noted they had to make sure they

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  get certification requirements.

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  And then a really important note is that paying for

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  farmer time was inconsistent and dependent on the network and

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  how that each network allocated their budget, even though resources

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  for the project for people, not every farmer and received

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  payment directly better time.

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  If this had been consistent, it might have helped with

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  far more engagement overall then, as is true with many

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  on farm participatory trials, there's a bit of a conflict

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  between common needs and interests and scientific figure.

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  So it's difficult to have benefits, especially across multiple farms

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  and different networks.

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  And then we were also disrupted by covid.

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  So there was a bit of a limitation, researcher engagement

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  and interaction directly to farmers Despite the challenges, we did

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  have some success.

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  So overall we had strong farmer engagement across the networks

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  with 33 farmers currently participating across all seven networks.

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  In this last year of the trial there was collaboration

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  coordination within and between networks and the pandemic.

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  Actually encourage some virtual media's and networks stayed in touch

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  and WhatsApp chat as well.

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  We successfully trialed and implemented new technologies and practices.

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  Farmers were encouraged to be able to trial new varieties

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  and actually look at innovative weed control in some situations.

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  And then there was direct engagement and feedback between farmers

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  and stakeholders.

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  Flying decision support tools was a great example of this

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  where the designers of the tool, we're able to work

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  directly with farmers and get feedback and then farmers were

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  engaged in making suggestions for how to good innovations like

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  the introduction overall some main takeaways to this approach is

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  to have farmer input even earlier.

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  So even earlier project design, have it driven by farmer

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  interests and includes social science components to identify barriers and

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  enablers. Very beginning of the project, we also suggest extending

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  the length of a project like this so you can

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  redesign innovations and continue to have on found evaluation consistently

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  More than five years.

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  I want to thank all the different authors who contributed

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  throughout this work package and Solis who are all listed

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  here as well as their organizations.

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  Hope you read the paper and let us know if

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  you have any questions.

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  Thank you very much