Building an understanding of water use innovation adoption processes through farmer-driven experimentation

Abstract

Smallholder farmers in Southern Africa are faced with the challenge of securing their livelihoods within the context of a wide variety of biophysical and socio-economic constraints. Agriculture is inherently risky, particularly in regions prone to drought or dry spells, and risk-averse farmers may be viewed by researchers or extension agents as reluctant to invest in agricultural innovations that have potential to improve their livelihoods. However, farmers themselves are more interested in personal livelihood security than any other stakeholder and it is the farmers’ perceptions of needs, investment options and risks that drive their decision-making process. A holistic approach to agricultural innovation development and extension is needed to address both socio-economic and biophysical dynamics that influence adoption and dissemination of innovations. This paper, presents a methodology for involving farmers from the Bergville district of South Africa in the process of innovation development through facilitation of farmer-driven gardening experiments. Facilitating farmer-driven experimentation allows farmers to methodically assess the value of innovations they choose to study while providing researchers with a venue for learning about socio-economic as well as biophysical influences on farmers’ decisions. With this knowledge, researchers can focus on developing innovations that are socially and economically appropriate and therefore, more readily adoptable. The participatory process gave farmers the tools they needed to make informed decisions through critical thinking and analysis and improved their confidence in explaining the function of innovations to others. Researchers were able to use farmers’ manually collected data and observations to supplement laboratory generated and electronically recorded information about soil water dynamics to understand water balances associated with different garden bed designs, and to investigate whether trench beds, drip irrigation and water harvesting with run-on ditches tended to improve water use efficiency. Wetting front detectors (WFD) were shown to have some potential as management tools for farmers, provided certain limitations are addressed, while drip irrigation was found to be impractical because the available drip kits were prone to malfunction and farmers believed they did not provide enough water to the plants. Farmers participating in a series of monthly, hands-on workshops that encouraged individual experimentation tended to adopt and sustain use of many introduced garden innovations. Farmers who were also seriously involved in a formalized research and experimentation process at their own homesteads became more proficient with gardening systems in general, through continual trial-and-error comparisons and making decisions based on observations, than those who were not involved. This suggests that the practice of on-going experimentation, once established, reaches beyond the limits of facilitation by researchers or extension agents, into the realm of sustainable change and livelihood improvement through adoption, adaptation and dissemination of agricultural innovations.