Agronomic Evaluation of Bread Wheat Varieties from Participatory Breeding: A Combination of Performance and Robustness

Isabelle Goldringer,Christian Dalmasso,Julien Bailly,Maxime Garnault,Alexandre Hyacinthe,Pierre Rivière,François Caizergues,Patrick De Kochko,Jonathan Locqueville,Caroline Bouvier D’Yvoire,Julien Lacanette,Jean-Sébastien Gascuel,Gaëlle Van Frank,Jean-François Berthellot,Emma Forst,Nathalie Galic,Sophie Pin,Bernard Ronot,Hélène Montaz,Florent Mercier,Raphaël Baltassat

doi:10.3390/su12010128

Abstract

Participatory plant breeding (PPB) is based on the decentralization of selection in farmers’ fields and their involvement in decision-making at all steps of the breeding scheme. Despite the evidence of its benefits to develop population varieties adapted to diversified and local practices and conditions, such as organic farming, PPB is still not widely used. There is a need to share more broadly how the different programs have overcome scientific, practical, and organizational issues and produced a large number of positive outcomes. Here, we report on a PPB program that started on bread wheat in France in 2006 and has achieved a range of outcomes, from the emergence of new organization among actors, to specific experimental designs and statistical methods developed, and to populations varieties developed and cultivated by farmers. We present the results of a two-year agronomic evaluation of the first population varieties developed within this PPB program compared to two commercial varieties currently grown in organic agriculture. We found that several PPB varieties were of great agronomic interest, combining relatively good performance even under the most favorable conditions of organic agriculture and good robustness, i.e., the ability to maintain productivity under more constraining conditions. The PPB varieties also tended to show a good temporal dynamic stability and appeared promising for the farmers involved.

Highlights

Participatory plant breeding (PPB) is based on the decentralization of selection in farmers’ fields and their involvement in decision making at all steps of the breeding scheme
Ten population varieties developed within the bread wheat French PPB program were proposed by five farmers involved in the project
Renan and Hendrix had the largest spatial ecovalences (254 and 196, respectively) with values much larger than the largest PPB variety ecovalence (141 for Mélange1-13-Pops), the smallest being those of Dauphibois and Japhabelle (22.0 and 18.4) (Figure 4b)

Summary

Introduction

Participatory plant breeding (PPB) is based on the decentralization of selection in farmers’ fields and their involvement in decision making at all steps of the breeding scheme. It allows the development of varieties that may be finely adapted to local pedo-climatic conditions, to farmers’ agronomic practices, and to the type of products and marketing. PPB has been used worldwide (in 10 developed and 59 developing countries) with 47 different crops, as reviewed by Ceccarelli and Grando [4]. PPB’s benefits are expected to be high in countries where industrialized agriculture has become the dominant model, as it can be a way to finely target the diversified and specific local practices and conditions that arise under organic or other agroecological farming practices, and support the agroecological transition of agriculture. For PPB to be more widely used under these conditions, there are several scientific, practical, and organizational issues, and a need to share more broadly how the different programs have overcome these problems and produced a large number of diverse positive outcomes

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion