Eleven years ago this week, Apple Inc. released the iPhone. While it was not the first smartphone on the market, industry experts often credit the iPhone’s groundbreaking design with the launch of the mobile revolution. The device, its competitors and the apps that emerged with them have changed how over two billion people interact with the world on a daily basis.

The success of this revolution, however, goes far beyond the actual technology. At the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) outside Mexico City, scaling expert Lennart Woltering points to a smartphone lying on his desk.

“We have to remember that this phone is just hardware. It is useless if you don’t have a network connection or an outlet in your house with electricity,” he says.

Woltering joined CIMMYT last year as part of the German Development Cooperation’s effort to aid the scaling-up of agricultural innovations. New, improved seeds, small-scale machinery and conservation practices can all play a role in achieving several of the Sustainable Development Goals, but Woltering says many other non-technological factors, such as markets and policies, can prevent these innovations from having significant impact.

“Many research institutes and nongovernmental organizations tend to focus on technology as the solution for everything,” he says. “But we find that 9 out of 10 cases, limiting factors have more to do with financing not being available to people, or poor policies that are hampering the adoption of technology.”

For example, CIMMYT has many initiatives in South Asia to promote conservation agriculture. Adopting no-till practices can help reduce erosion and improve soil health for better yields, but farmers who make this transition often need access to a different kind of machinery, such as the Happy Seeder, to plant their seeds. If government subsidies exist for conventional rototillers but not for the Happy Seeder, it is difficult to persuade farmers to make that economic sacrifice.

“It is a completely different ballgame in the real world, and you have to be honest about whatever fake reality you created in your project,” says Woltering.

Projects are designed in a very controlled way. They have a fixed budget and a fixed end date, and they are often shielded from the social and economic complexities that can propel or hinder an innovation from scaling.

“So if a donor says, ‘We want two million people to be reached,’ well, how are you going to do that? That’s where the Scaling Scan can help,” says Woltering.

The Scaling Scan helps an individual analyze, reflect on, and sharpen one’s scaling ambition and approach through a series of questions and prompts. It focuses on ten scaling ‘ingredients’ that need to be considered (e.g. knowledge and skills, public sector governance, awareness and demand) to reach the desired outcome.

“The Scaling Scan helps you figure out what exactly is required, what is possible, and what bottlenecks exist that you need to address in your strategy,” Woltering says.

Woltering collaborated with The PPPLab, a consortium of four Dutch institutes, to release the first version of the Scaling Scan last year. They tested it with project teams in the Netherlands, Mexico, India, Nepal and Kenya, and based on the feedback, they are now releasing a second version, which is available here.

In the trials with the first Scaling Scan, some teams realized the results they wanted to achieve were too ambitious given the circumstances. For other teams, it helped them clarify exactly what they wanted to achieve.

“Having a project objective is not enough to internalize the main goal,” says Woltering. “It also changes over time, especially if it’s a long-term project. The scaling scan can be good for an annual checkup.”

Woltering emphasizes that successful scaling requires multidisciplinary collaboration.

“If you only have a team of agronomists, you will not reach a scale of millions you want to achieve. If you only have a team of policy experts, you will not succeed,” he says. “There are professionals that can really help and add value to what we are doing.”

“It’s hard to get an agronomist and an economist in the same room together, but we’re not going to change the world if we don’t work together with others who have their specific specialty or expertise,” he says.

The Scaling Scan also includes a responsibility check through some very simple but strategic questions.

“Every system has its pros and cons – some people benefit, some do not. Some have power, some do not,” says Woltering. “So what does it mean if your innovation goes to scale? Maybe there’s a whole new power dimension.”

Successfully scaling something may have unintended consequences. There are always tradeoffs and resistance to change. Woltering says the responsibility check can help actors in the development sector to think through these questions and consider what the possible outcomes could be.

For more explanation on how and when to use the tool, we invite you to download the Scaling Scan (also available in Spanish) which contains detailed practical information. We recommend the Excel sheet (also available in Spanish) to have the average scores and results generated automatically. A condensed, two-page PDF is also available.

This work is supported by the German Development Cooperation (GIZ) and led by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).

EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) — Crop genetic gains remain too low, and international scientists are making a concerted effort to determine how best to increase yields to ensure there is enough food to feed everyone on the planet by 2050.

The complex task of increasing genetic gains – the amount of increase in performance achieved per unit time through artificial selection – involves considering many variables, including genotypes and phenotypes – selecting crop varieties with desired gene traits and considering how well they perform in a given environment.

Two new research papers by scientists at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and partners at Australia’s University of Queensland and Spain’s University of Barcelona published in “Trends in Plant Science” highlight some of the best available tools and strategies for meeting the challenge.

Currently, crop breeding methods and agronomic management put annual productivity increases at 1.2 percent a year, but to ensure food security for future generations, productivity should be at 2.4 percent a year.

By 2050, the United Nations projects that the current global population of 7.6 billion will grow to more than 9.8 billion, making yield increases vital.

The results of grain yield increases each year are a function of the length of the breeding process, the accuracy of which breeders can estimate the potential of new germplasm, the size of the breeding program, the intensity of selection, and the genetic variation for the trait of interest.

“Reducing the length of the breeding process is the fastest way for breeders to increase their gains in grain yield per year,” said HuiHui Li, quantitative geneticist based at CIMMYT Beijing.

Speed breeding and other new techniques have the potential to double gains made by breeders some crops. Speed breeding protocols enable six generations of crops to be generated within a single year, compared to just two generations using traditional protocols.

Pioneered by scientist Lee Hickey at University of Queensland, speed breeding relies on continuous light to trick plants into growing faster, which means speed breeding can only be undertaken in a controlled environment.

Tapping into larger populations increases the probability of identifying superior offspring, but breeding is an expensive and time consuming process due to the variables involved.

One challenge scientists face is high-throughput field phenotyping, which involves characterising hundreds of plants a day to identify the best genetic variation for making new varieties. New phenotyping tools can estimate key traits such as senescence, reducing the time of data collection from a day or more to less than an hour.

“If breeders could reduce the cost of phenotyping, they can reallocate resources towards growing larger populations,” said Mainassara Zaman-Allah, a senior scientist at CIMMYT-Zimbabwe and a key contributor to the paper “Translating High Throughput Phenotyping into Genetic Gain.”

“Limitations on phenotyping efficiency are considered a key constraint to genetic advance in breeding programs,” said Mike Olsen, maize upstream trait pipeline coordinator with CIMMYT, based in Nairobi. “New phenotyping tools to more efficiently measure required traits will play an important role in increasing gains.”

New tools and techniques can only help contribute to food security if they are easily available and adopted. The CGIAR Excellence in Breeding Platform, launched in 2017, will play a pivotal role in ensuring these new tools reach breeding programs targeting the developing world.

Related:

Translating high-throughput phenotyping into genetic gain

Fast-forwarding genetic gain

Gender awareness and gender-sensitive approaches are slowly spreading into agricultural research, extension, and policy in Ethiopia, based on recent statements from a cross section of professionals and practitioners in the country.

An initiative led by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) is helping to drive evidence-based approaches to foster gender equality and include it in mainstream agricultural research.

Moges Bizuneh, deputy head of the agricultural office of Basona District, attended a CIMMYT-organized workshop in which Ethiopia-specific results were presented from GENNOVATE, a large-scale qualitative study involving focus groups and interviews with more than 7,500 rural men and women in 26 developing countries. “I have learned a lot about gender and it’s not just about women, but about both women and men,” said Bizuneh.

The District of Basona has nearly 30,000 households, 98 percent of which depend on agriculture for food and livelihoods but have access to an average of only 1.5 hectares of land. More than 10,000 of those households are headed by females, because many males and youth have left Basona to seek opportunities in large cities or other countries.

Bizuneh and his colleagues are working with a district gender specialist and a women and gender unit to make gender sensitive approaches a regular part of their activities. In this, he concedes that he and other professionals are contending with “deep-rooted social and cultural norms around divisions of labor and a lack of awareness regarding gender issues.”

One surprise for Bizuneh, from group discussions regarding innovation and involvement in CIMMYT’s gender research, was that women said it was important to share experiences with other farmers and obtain new knowledge.

“No men mentioned that,” he remarked. “This shows that, if provided with information and support, women can innovate.”

Women and men plan and change together

Another product from the project is a 2017 review of gender-transformative methodologies for Ethiopia’s agriculture sector, co-authored by Kristie Drucza, project lead, and Wondimu Abebe, a research assistant, both from CIMMYT.

Drucza presented on the people-centered methodologies described in the publication at a recent workshop in Addis Ababa, offering diverse lessons of use for research and development professionals.

“The methodologies involve participatory research to help households and communities assess their situation and develop solutions to problems,” said Drucza. “By working with men and boys and allowing communities to set the pace of change, these approaches reduce the likelihood of a backlash against women—something that too frequently accompanies gender-focused programs.”

Annet Abenakyo Mulema, social scientist in gender at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), intends to apply some of the same methods to help rural families understand household and community gender dynamics and their role in managing the families’ goats, sheep, and other livestock.

“A 2015 study we did uncovered gender relationships associated with disease transmission,” Mulema explained. “Women and girls normally clean the animal pens and so are exposed to infections. Social conventions in the community make women feel inferior and not empowered to speak out about animal health, which is considered a man’s domain. We encouraged men and women to share roles and work together, and this made it easier for both to quickly identify disease outbreaks at early stages and prevent infections from spreading throughout the herd or to humans.”

Mulema said Drucza’s workshop helped her to understand and appreciate methodologies such as social analysis and action, community conversations, and gender action learning systems to support a shared, local response to the problem. “As another outcome, we spoke to service providers, such as veterinarians and extension agents, who needed to understand how gender related to animal health and the fact that the relationships between women and men in a community can change.”

Meskerem Mulatu, gender and nutrition specialist in Ethiopia’s Agricultural Growth Program II (AGP II) Capacity Development Support Facility (CDSF), said her group invited Drucza to speak on gender and social norms at a national workshop organized by AGP II CDSF in October 2017.

“Our event was on gender, nutrition, and climate-smart agriculture,” according to Meskerem. “Many technologies are gender-sensitive but research and extension are not giving this adequate attention because there is no common operational definition. Their preconception is ‘technology is technology; it’s the same for men and women.’ Drucza’s evidence-based presentation showed that men and women may have different technology demands.”

Meskerem is going to train district agricultural officers to use a transformative methodology identified by Drucza. “Kristie’s report is really good timing,” she said. “We were thinking of doing something in terms of gender and these methodologies make sense.”

Recording data on changes in social norms

In June 2017, Drucza presented the findings of her meta-analysis of evaluations of gender in Ethiopian agricultural development at a senior staff meeting of the Ethiopia office of CARE, the global humanitarian organization. Among the 26 agricultural program evaluations considered, explained Drucza, only three had strong findings, a heavy inclusion of gender, and evidence of changes in social norms—and all three were CARE projects.

One was the Graduation with Resilience to Achieve Sustainable Development (GRAD) initiative. As an outcome of Drucza’s presentation, CARE is refining the way it records certain social data, according to Elisabeth Farmer, Deputy Chief of Party for the CARE’s Feed the Future Ethiopia–Livelihoods for Resilience Activity project, which emerged from GRAD.

“Our baseline study protocol and questionnaire for the new project hadn’t been finalized yet,” Farmer said. “We were thinking through the difference between using a scale that scores responses along a range, such as a Likert scale, versus asking respondents “yes or no”-type questions, for instance regarding women’s access to information or equitable decision-making in the household.

“As Drucza explained, when it comes to gender norms, you may not get all the way from a “no” to a “yes”, but only from a “2” to “3”, and we want to make sure that we are capturing these smaller shifts, so we incorporated scales with ranges into our baseline and will ensure that these are used in future assessments to track transformations in social norms.”

According to Drucza, who leads the CIMMYT project “Understanding gender in wheat-based livelihoods for enhanced WHEAT R4D impact in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Ethiopia,” funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, research must be relevant and useful.

“I’m happy to learn that our results are useful to a diverse range of actors, from development partners to policy makers and local agricultural officers,” she said.

Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet released today seeks to reconcile two worldviews spurred by agronomist Norman Borlaug and ecologist William Vogt, to help us better understand how we can feed 10 billion people by 2050; without destroying our planet in the process.

Borlaug, the “wizard” of the book, launched his vision from a small parcel of “badly damaged land” near Mexico City that would become the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). He was a key figure in developing high-yielding wheat varieties that saved millions from starvation in the 1960s, launching a global Green Revolution and becoming an emblem for “techno-optimism,” or the view that science and technology will meet humanity’s growing demands.

Vogt’s 1948 book “The Road to Survival” became the blueprint for today’s modern environmental movement, prophesizing that unless humankind drastically reduces consumption, its growing numbers and appetite will overwhelm the planet’s resources. His novels and speeches inspired conservationists from Rachel Carson to Paul Ehrlich, and defined our concept of “environment” as an entity that deserves respect and protection.

Mann uses the views of Borlaug and Vogt as endpoints on a “wizard-prophet” spectrum to illustrate different approaches experts are taking to solve four great, complex challenges of our time: food, water, energy and climate change.

But who is right? We, humans, are the only species on Earth that have been able to bend nature to our will. For thousands of years we burned forests to kill insects and encourage the growth of useful species, then later turned the planet into our “personal petri dish,” as Mann puts it, with the rise of agriculture and creation of crops like maize, which allowed Mesoamerican civilizations to grow and flourish. Today, violence and poverty are at an all-time low due to the wizardly-successes of Borlaug and others

However, Mann cautions past successes are no guarantee of the future. Vogt’s Malthusian predictions didn’t come to pass, but Borlaug’s wizardry also had unintended social and environmental consequences. Fertilizer runoff, over-extraction of groundwater and the burning of fossil fuels are creating an increasingly inhospitable planet and arguably pushing us closer to Vogt’s envisioned planetary limits than ever before.

Both Borlaug and Vogt identified as environmentalists trying to solve the same monumental challenge of having too many people to feed but not enough resources. Their ideological heirs are also working to solve equally challenging problems but are bitterly opposed, in large part because the argument is less about facts and more about values.

Prophets see humans as living in a finite world with constrained limits imposed by the environment, while wizards believe human ingenuity gives us an endless array of tools to manage the environment for our needs.

Mann doesn’t take either side, but rather offers solutions proposed by both prophets and wizards. He cites efforts to change the way photosynthesis works in rice at the International Rice Research Institute, but also initiatives like the domestication of wild perennial plants at the Land Institute. Both prophets and wizards have multiple, on-going efforts to meet all four challenges that Mann covers in the book. He says that it’s possible individual efforts won’t work, but the odds of all efforts failing are equally small.

Most importantly, there are many individuals and organizations today that are attempting to embrace both ideologies. CIMMYT, an organization that was founded by the original wizard, now incorporates sustainable agriculture practices into its work globally, with an emphasis on social inclusion.

The Wizard and the Prophet’s in-depth mix of biographical, historical, philosophical and scientific detail allows us to confront our wizard/prophet bias, and leaves one with a greater sense of respect for those with differing views on how we should shape our world in the 21^st century.

Buy “The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World” here.