Member profile
Ms. Esther Ronner
Organization:
Wageningen University and Research
Country:
Netherlands
Field(s) of expertise:
I am working on:
PhD research on best-fit grain legume technologies for smallholder farming systems in Africa, within the N2Africa project (www.n2africa.org).
Ms. Esther Ronner
Pulses, and especially common bean, are important staple crops in many East African countries and provide an important source of protein and calories. Their productivity, however, is still far below potential. Challenges to enhance production of pulses are often not only found at field level, but require understanding of the farm level and farming systems as pulses are grown among many other crops and smallholders rarely invest all their resources in a single crop.
In the densely populated highlands of East Africa, climbing beans offer potential to intensify bean production compared to bush beans. Climbing beans have been successfully introduced in some East African countries (e.g. Rwanda), but there is still considerable potential to extend their cultivation. Through the N2Africa project (www.n2africa.org) we work on the extension of climbing beans in the highlands in eastern and southwestern Uganda. Challenges to expand the production of climbing beans in these areas include access to staking materials, to cash to obtain inputs and to labour. This implies that climbing beans may be more or less suitable for certain types of farmers, and that we may need to offer a ‘basket of options’ of climbing bean technologies that require more or less of farmers’ scarce resources. We are developing such options through a co-design process, consisting of an iterative cycle of co-design, implementation and evaluation of climbing bean technologies.
Some results from the co-design of climbing bean technologies in Uganda:
- Farmers find yield an important criterion to judge the success of a new technology, but use it next to other criteria which differ between poorer and wealthier farmers, men and women, and different areas.
- Men and women value different attributes of technologies; when comparing two climbing bean varieties, women for instance placed relatively more emphasis on characteristics of the leaves (used as vegetable), maturity time and taste, which may reflect women’s involvement in the production of beans for home consumption.
- Although we aimed to find low-cost staking materials as an alternative for wooden stakes, farmers still prefer wooden stakes for their ease of implementation and relatively low labour requirements. This shows the difficulty of finding solutions to address the challenges of the poorest farmers.
As a next step, we tested issues that emerged from the co-design process in agronomy trials:
- As farmers still prefer wooden stakes but also have challenges accessing it, farmers sometimes cut longer stakes in two to plant a larger area. We normally advise farmers to use long stakes, as the longer the stake the better the yield. However, as yield is only one of the criteria that farmers use, we set up an additional experiment to find out to what extent the yield obtained by taller stakes would outweigh the costs for staking.
- Demonstrations of improved technologies in the project all involved sole crops of climbing bean. As about three quarter of the farmers in eastern and southwestern Uganda grows their climbing beans in intercropping with banana, coffee or other crops, we decided to set up an experiment on intercropping of climbing bean with banana. We pruned leaves of banana plants to enable the beans to receive more light for a better yield. This way, we adjust our experiments to develop recommendations that have better local relevance.
Results of such a co-design process lead to the development of a basket of locally relevant options and diversified extension messages that can be applied in our efforts to address the challenges of smallholder farmers producing pulses.