- Trust is the biggest barrier to scaling agricultural innovation
- Governments and scientists play a key role in building confidence in new technologies.
- Industry collaboration and on-farm proof essential to large-scale adoption.
Today, new science and agricultural innovation are being generated faster than ever. Yet despite this progress, relatively little innovation reaches farmers at commercial scale.
Dr Yvonne Pinto, director general of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), described the problem as particularly “urgent” in Asia Pacific while moderating a panel at the Asia Pacific Agri-Food Summit held this week.
“The region still accounts for 40% of the world’s hungry, and South East Asian smallholders need about $100 billion a year in financing, while current flows meet less than a third of that figure,” she said.
Farmers trust farmers
Jasper van Halder, chief innovation officer at farmer-owned cooperative Ravensdown and CEO of Agnition Ventures, said trust was the “biggest gap” in why many innovations fail to scale.
“We’re an industry of many small and medium enterprises, and it’s really hard to reach those customers. Those customers don’t have the time. They want to work their land, care for their animals and grow their crops.
“They’re not going to go to conferences or read magazines all day long. They turn to their representatives or trusted advisers. Most of the time, though, they go to their neighbours. They look at what their neighbour has done, and if it works, then they’re willing to give it a go,” said van Halder.
To address this, the New Zealand farmer cooperative established a network of farmer beta testers who trial new technologies in real-world conditions before they are introduced more widely.
“We set up a network of a couple of hundred beta testers, farmers who put up their hand to try new technologies, and we do the scouting for them because farmers don’t have time to look at all the different ideas coming out of the innovation world.”
The trusted voices
Fan Shenggen, dean of the Academy of Global Food Economics and Policy at China Agricultural University, said trust is also cultivated through institutions that farmers view as credible.
Drawing on survey findings from China, he said government and scientific institutions remain among the most trusted sources of information.
Fan believes that companies should engage more closely with policymakers and researchers when introducing new technologies.
“If we want to make sure that smallholders adopt new technology innovations, you’ve got to work with policy. And scientists. How can we really engage scientists because they are trustworthy to society? Can we ask scientists to communicate some of the key issues to the whole society?”
Building confidence with proof
Gareth Edgecombe, CEO of fresh produce major T&G Global, highlighted the importance of building confidence through evidence.
The company, best known for its proprietary apple varieties such as Envy, has created apples capable of performing under heat stress and water scarcity – attributes that are becoming increasingly valuable as climate change puts pressure on production.
While identifying promising genetics is difficult, Edgecombe said the other challenge lies in scaling them.
“Why is innovation not scaling? For me, it comes down to fragmentation. There are lots of smallholders that don’t have the funds to see concept testing through, and fragmentation in the value chain means farmers are so separated from consumer markets that value is lost along the way. As a result, they’re not able to realise the benefits of those programmes.”
To overcome these challenges, T&G has adopted collective trialling models that spread testing costs among multiple participants and payment structures that allow growers to pay for innovation only once products are generating revenue.
The company also focuses on developing highly differentiated products with clear consumer benefits that can command premiums in the marketplace.
“If you’ve got innovation that doesn’t make a difference at consumer level, it’s really hard to monetise,” Edgecombe said.
‘Collective trust needed’
Marisa Soares, senior vice-president for global open innovation at Yara International, said this was a “systematic problem”.
“You have multiple players and we keep coming back to the point of how we build that trust. We’ve realised that we need to harness collective trust to reach the farmer. We need to not just leverage our strengths but bring together multiple players across that ecosystem to build collective trust to reach the farmer at scale.”
She highlighted a soil health accelerator in Kenya that Yara conducted with support from the World Bank and Kenyan government institutions.
“We leverage our trust and network and our expertise. But we also bring partners who are interested in scaling those solutions.”
Soares added that successful models already exist and the industry can learn from and adapt them across markets.
“There are already some really good examples. I don’t think we need to reinvent the wheel. I think we need to share more and learn more from others.”
She pointed to Chinese smallholder farming systems as an example the industry can learn from.
“What we’re seeing, for example, in some of the Chinese smallholder environments is that there is that collective trust, and it does start at the government level, with having that strategy and vision and articulating it really well and then starting to mobilise within that space.
