Farmers’ Preferred Varieties & Quality Seed System (FPV-QSS)

The farmer participatory approach aims to provide a platform for training farmers with the best seed production practices while co-learning with researchers and extension officers. Crops varieties’ growth performance and seed yields across sites vary widely, thus influencing farmers’ preferences for specific varieties.

It is therefore important to have farmers prioritize multiplication of seed for most-adapted and preferred varieties in their respective environments and communities. Such exercises help to:

  • Provide farmers with experiential learning opportunities to multiply and preserve seed quality.
  • Train farmers in methods for testing and monitoring seed viability under conditions of farmer-managed seed systems.
  • Co-develop marketing systems with farmer groups to include packaging, distribution (local and external outlets), and assessment of demand.
  • Maintain/preserve backup seed of germplasm collections of varieties collected from farming communities during project’s initial phase.
  • Engage relevant policymakers on seed systems to facilitate recognition of quality of seed multiplied of crops under farmer-managed seed system.

The above factors help to increase smallholder farmer knowledge, attitudes, and practices on production, storage, and distribution of quality and preferred seed under integrated seed system environments.

Food and nutrition security is a key development indicator for children’s health. However, decades of global efforts to combat hunger are proving to be insufficient in the face of growing challenges (i.e., conflict, climate extremes, and economic shocks) that have been further aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic. As per verified report by CGIAR, currently, about 1 in 10 people face hunger and 2.37 billion people face moderate or severe food insecurity, with the majority in Asia and Africa.

Seed systems are a collection of various interacting actors and tools like technologies, formal and informal groups, market and non-market institutions that allow the use and exchange of seeds. Unfortunately, in low and middle-income countries where smallholder farms are most vulnerable to shocks and stresses and where there is widespread malnutrition, timely and sufficient access to quality and preferred seeds remains challenging. To address this issue, seed system interventions are being developed and implemented, including breeding of improved varieties, capacity strengthening across the seed value chains, and enhancing access to finance to support farmer access to seeds.

Most seed and seed systems focused on crop productivity, use of improved seed, and increasing seed access, while only a few looked into traditional and indigenous seeds, and the sustainable integration of seed to existing seed systems. Despite global movements to diet diversity, most interventions are focused on staple foods such as rice and maize.

Orissa Foundation strategizes to merge these two essential elements – FPV and QSS, to address the most critical input in agriculture – access to quality seed.