We are no longer updating the Research Digest. All content remains.
The Permaculture Research Digest has summaries of newly published permaculture-related research. All items are hyper-linked to the original publication.
The 'January 2013' archive contains 60 items published in 2012.
Items marked with a # have restricted public access, although abstracts are freely available.
Participatory approaches involving on-farm
experimentation have become more prevalent in agricultural research.
Nevertheless, these approaches remain difficult to scale because they
usually require close attention from well-trained professionals. Novel
large-N participatory trials,
building on recent advances in citizen science and crowdsourcing
methodologies, involve large numbers of participants and little
researcher supervision. This study experimentally
assess the accuracy of farmer observations in trials. At five sites in Honduras, 35 farmers
participated in tricot experiments. They ranked three varieties of
common bean for Plant vigor, Plant architecture, Pest resistance, and Disease resistance. Reliability of farmers’ experimental
observations was generally low, but aggregated observations contained information and
had sufficient validity to
identify the correct ranking orders of varieties. Our sample size simulation
shows that low reliability can be compensated by engaging higher numbers
of observers, realistic numbers of less
than 200 participants can produce meaningful results for agricultural
research by tricot-style trials.
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