Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
Historically, breeding crops to improve their performance in intercrops has been an intractable problem. Recent technological developments in plant breeding, specifically, genomic selection methods, crop growth models, and high throughput image capture using drones, however, will allow progress. Though intercrops have been shown to perform better than monocrops in multiple ways, we have only a poor understanding of the most important aspects of intercrops are for farmers. Before embarking on breeding for intercrops, we will use this planning grant to consult with farmers to build our understanding of their needs and thus define breeding goals that they will embrace.To accomplish this information gathering, we will first develop a set of contacts with farmer organizations, cooperative extension agents, and farmer stakeholders. These contacts will be people who are interested in intercropping and in defining appropriate research and breeding directions for intercrops. We will interact with key farmer stakeholders to define a survey likely to capture the breadth of farmer needs. We will administer that survey and analyze responses. We will deepen the understanding derived from the survey through focus groups. We will leverage this understanding to define the objectives of grant proposals seeking to fund breeding for intercropping to benefit farm diversity and ecological intensification.
Animal Health Component
100%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
100%
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
Objective 1:We will connect with cooperative extension and with farmer organizations (see support letters) to identify farmers interested in intercropping. Participants will also be identified through the USDA Organic Integrity Database, listservs, and conferences. We will first reach out to key stakeholders viewed as community leaders. These stakeholders will play a critical role both in formulating survey questions and, with consent, as "survey champions" to promote the completion and return of the survey among farmers in their communities. We will not limit the survey to organic farmers, though we anticipate that a majority of participants will be organic or transitional.At this early time in the grant, we will also lay the groundwork for focus groups. Scheduling to dovetail with winter meetings and seeking permission to present at those meetings happens well in advance. We recognize that several of us have not been members of the organic community. The burden will be on us to show that we care about its philosophy and social relationships. We will be asking farmers for help through sharing observations derived from their work. We will seek to deserve that help.In the collaborative network that we want to create, we hope to attend to its racial equity. As much as in any other area, seeking racial equity will require cultural humility. Our current collaborative includes one Filipino and two Latinx members. We are otherwise all of white European descent. Efforts at racial equity need racially diverse leadership (Penniman, 2018), which we do not have. Nevertheless, as we engage in understanding farmer needs, we will seek both equitable processes and outcomes (Brzozowski et al., 2022). A number of farmer organizations and cooperative extension agencies have policy statements and resources for equity and inclusion (e.g., https://marbleseed.org/about/racial-equity; https://staff.cce.cornell.edu/board-toolbox/dei). In planning, we will consult with these resources.Objective 2:The survey will be developed iteratively in consultation with key stakeholders. Topics will include farmer demographics, current acreage, current intercropping practices, anticipated benefits in several areas (e.g., overall marketable production, non-marketable organic matter production, weed pressure, disease and pest prevalence, soil fertility and health, seed sourcing, logistical challenges, perceived training needs, and other topics identified by key stakeholders). The survey instrument will be designed and distributed using the Tailored Design Method (Dillman et al., 2014). The survey will be piloted with a group of non-key-stakeholder farmers then distributed via paper mail and email. Each participant will receive multiple contacts. We will prime survey respondents to consider possible breeding targets by opening the survey with a paragraph on genetic variability and its use to tailor adaptation and performance. In collating responses, we will highlight constraints that might be mitigated by breeding. Many constraints might be more effectively addressed by management or engineering interventions. For the focus groups, we will seek to set up contrasts between approaches to better rank them.One or more focus groups will be conducted with farmers at regional organic farming conferences, such as the Marbleseed Organic Farming Conference in St. Croix, WI. We will coordinate the travel with farmer organizations to leverage their winter meetings so that in-person focus groups can be held without additional farmer travel. Questions will focus on key topics identified through a preliminary analysis of the survey data. Focus groups will be planned and facilitated according to the best practices. Each focus group will include up to twelve participants and will last between one and two hours. Focus groups will be led by a facilitator and an assistant; the facilitator will introduce the goals of the study, obtain consent from participants, ask open-ended questions, and draw out participants as needed. The assistant will take notes. Focus groups will be recorded for future transcription and analysis.Objective 3:Researchers will meet virtually for a project initiation meeting in September 2023. Thereafter, the group will meet bimonthly to progress toward defining goals and writing a larger proposal. Broadly, the agendas for these meetings will be: 1. Project initiation and Networking (Sept). Re-iterate purpose of planning grant. Identify a keynote speaker on collaborations with the organic farming community. We will brainstorm organizations and distribution lists to approach and divide tasks according to Co-PDs with the best connections. 2. Survey Prep (Nov). We will invite key stakeholders. Co-PDs will bring in survey topic area and question suggestions. All suggestions will be consolidated into the first survey draft. 3. Preliminary survey results (Jan). It will still be early in the survey, but we will need some initial idea of survey outcomes to begin planning the larger proposal. We will define objectives and decide if we need other researchers given farmer needs. 4. Planning and writing tasks (Mar). This meeting will occur in the shadow of the likely deadline for the 2024 OREI RFA. We will plan final tasks prior to grant submission. 5. Field Day and post grant proposal planning (Jun). We will hold an in-person meeting and field day event in Ithaca, NY. Final results of the stakeholder survey and focus groups will be synthesized and presented at the meeting. The meeting will allow more long-term objective setting and planning to target multiple funding sources including the NIFA CGP-FAS RFA.
Project Methods
Some survey questions will be quantitative in nature (e.g., relative rankings of different priorities). Others will be qualitative and require some interpretation (e.g., open-ended questions in the survey). Much of the focus group discussion will be of the latter sort, requiring determination of categories of topics and coding. We are fortunate to have on staff a Communications Specialist with experience in conducting exchanges with farmers and performing data compiling. We will interpret results along the dimensions of the particular species farmers are interested in, the reasons for those species, and the functions and ecosystem services farmers need intercrops to fulfill. We will use questionnaire approaches that emphasize possible tradeoffs between different traits or functions [e.g., conjoint analysis with pairwise alternatives (Byrne et al., 2012; Balogun et al., 2022)] to clarify their relative values among farmers.