Banners are hung, grain samples are on display, and a voice over a megaphone invites the crowd’s attention. The seedball caravan has arrived. This group of researchers, farmers, animators, and technicians is on a 100-village tour of the rural Maradi region of Niger, West Africa. They’re speaking to thousands of people about this unassuming little item.
About the size of a wine cork, a seedball is a mass of organic matter including ash, soil, urine, and pearl millet seeds. Pearl millet is a small, round grain that feeds vast swaths of sub-Saharan Africa. The seedballs contain a dense powerhouse of nutrients and protective elements that give the enclosed seeds a greater chance to flourish in a challenging climate.
The Role of Millets in West Africa
Seedball technology isn’t new, but it’s unfamiliar to many of the smallholder farmers who meet the caravan. The appeal is trifold: Seedballs are inexpensive, easily manufactured by farmers, and proven to generate results. This flexible technology and others like it are being harnessed by farmer-researcher teams to address the specific challenges of farming in semiarid climates. Environmental stressors to crops—decreased and erratic rainfall, pests, and blights—are worsening with climate change. This means identifying and adopting low-cost, accessible solutions is all the more urgent.
The introduction of powerful and scalable technologies is just one aspect of a broader paradigm shift in agricultural research, one that relies on equal collaboration between researchers, farmers and other organizations such as those who make up the seedball caravan. Over the course of Western colonization, those in power have largely dictated a one-size-fits-all approach to farming, often to the detriment of farmers’ livelihoods. Importing expensive chemical fertilizer, insisting on farming practices unsuited for local conditions, and prioritizing crop yield to maximize profit are some of the blanket agricultural prescriptions that have created unintended and lasting challenges.
Traditional farming practices, by contrast, have nourished these communities for thousands of years. Generational wisdom dictates that certain crops are better suited for certain regions. For West Africa, millets are an essential staple crop suited to West African growing conditions.
2023 has been dubbed “International Year of Millets” by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Sorghum, which belongs to the larger family of millets, is one such nutritious, Indigenous staple crop for West Africa. In the spirit of this annual theme, sorghum cultivation was recently explored in depth at the Global Sorghum Conference in Montpellier, France, in early June. Three West African farmer research organizations who presented at the conference have made significant contributions to the field using an inclusive and collaborative approach to research. It has allowed for the introduction of accessible technologies, such as seedballs, as well as fostering research on sorghum and pearl millet seed systems. Moreover, this approach lets their contributions scale well beyond their local contexts.
Co-Creation in Agricultural Research Serving Smallholder Farmers
The Fédération des Unions de Producteurs de Maradi (FUMA Gaskiya), based in the Maradi region of Niger, is a 17,000-member farmer organization that leads research on pearl millet and sorghum based production systems. Among their efforts is the formation of the seedball caravan. In the neighboring country of Burkina Faso, the Association Minim Sông Pânga (AMSP), with 5,000 members, leads efforts to advance sorghum breeding research to best serve farmland in their region. The Union Locale des Producteurs de Céréales (ULPC), based in Mali, focuses on the formation and support of seed distribution networks, particularly among women farmers, as part of its research efforts. They also engage with sorghum hybrid seed production.
Each has a longstanding relationship with the McKnight Foundation’s Global Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems (CRFS), which shares a mission to advance agroecological transformation. Together, they leverage farmer research networks (FRNs), a methodological approach embraced by CRFS that offers a paradigm change considering farmers as equal partners in research as opposed to ‘passive beneficiaries’ of research results.
Increasing Equity in the Research Process
AMSP’s organization name echoes the FRN paradigm; it means “knowledge must support the physical strength of farmers” in the Mooré language. The insights of everyone in the AMSP community—particularly women—was, at the start of AMSP’s research efforts, an underutilized asset. Now that knowledge pool is leveraged to create positive results for the community.
AMSP’s director, Roger Kaboré, explains that prioritizing the crop’s yield was a priority largely held by the men, who had historically been considered the primary decision makers. However, by including input from women farmers in the decision-making, AMSP could sharpen its priorities. “The women of the AMSP community are interested in the quality of sorghum crops,” Kaboré explains. “And quality, to them, is linked to how it is processed, because it is fundamentally for human consumption.” These criteria informed the development of sorghum seed varieties to meet these criteria.
Expanding the role of women in research was also essential to innovation at FUMA Gaskiya. “Women’s Fields,” a project that uses human urine to replace expensive imported chemical fertilizer, significantly increased the participating farmers’ crop yields—and its success hinged on the women in the community. Explains FUMA Gaskiya’s director, Ali Aminou, “As soon as you start talking about urine as a fertilizer, people run away. Thank goodness for the women who first believed in this project…We wondered, could the women who handle urine fertilizer influence how it is viewed socially?”
To counteract the social taboo of handling human waste, the women renamed the urine reclaimed for fertilizer as “oga,” or “the boss.” This simple shift allowed the project to progress enough for other farmers to see crops fertilized with urine better withstand pests and flourish. After the first growing cycle using this approach, farmers compared the two crops side-by-side: One, fertilized with urine, was thick with bright green pearl millet shoots that reached over one’s head; the other, the control crop, showed a sparsely populated field, beige sandy soil overwhelming the few, much smaller plants.
The Power of Collaborative Research
Dozens of new sorghum varieties—developed by AMSP in cooperation with research institutions like INERA, CIRAD, and ICRISAT that similarly value a collaborative approach to seed systems research—have been added to Burkina Faso’s national seed registry, to the benefit of farmers and their livelihoods. The Women’s Fields project in Niger has achieved global reach through its online videos, available to all who seek low-cost, accessible solutions for their crops.
Just as the compact seedball encompasses an incredible potential to feed families, collaborative approaches to agricultural research generate solutions that will sustainably and equitably feed our world. As Aminou offered in his closing remarks at the Year of the Millet Global Sorghum Conference, “When farmers and researchers are one, we can go far.”
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Photo courtesy of the McKnight Foundation’s Global Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems
