Rebecca Nelson is a molecular biologist who studies the population structure of the pathogen that causes late blight on potato, and the genetics of plant defense. She leads CIP’s project on late blight, and her interest in integrated disease management has led her to be increasingly involved in "downstream" activities such as farmer education and participatory research.

Nelson spent the month of February 2000 in the village of Baños de Quilcate, in San Miguel province in the northern Peruvian department of Cajamarca.

Baños de Quilcate is one of 13 communities in the province in which CIP and CARE-Peru are collaborating on pilot Farmer Field Schools (FFS) for potato growers. Biweekly sessions combine learning activities with experiments conducted by farmers on issues of concern to them. The schools also serve as proving grounds for promising new potato varieties.

CIP has recently teamed up with other research and extension organizations to launch FFS programs in seven countries—Bangladesh, Bolivia, China, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Peru, and Uganda.

Nelson’s hands-on experience with FFS began in 1994, when she worked at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines. She joined CIP in 1996, determined to test the FFS approach in potato. Below, she talks about what she learned during her month in the field.

Q. Why did you decide to spend a month in the mountains?

A. For the last three years my colleagues and I have been making short visits to the area during the field school season. But those trips have a high transaction cost. You spend a lot of time traveling for a little time in the field, and even then, you only get to see the most accessible sites. So you end up with an idealized view. I felt it was important to see the unabridged, unedited version.

Q. Were you pleased with what you saw?

A. Very much so. Of course, there are always things that could stand improvement. I had time not just to observe, but to help implement some changes. That’s a rare luxury.

Q. What sorts of changes?

A. One example has to do with the way the field experiments were being conducted. The farmers always work in teams. To make things less complicated, the facilitators had decided to organize those teams according to the different fungicide treatments required by three of the four experiments. But by dividing the work that way, the farmers lost track of the point of the experiments. Each group should have been in charge of a single experiment, following it through the entire season, instead of taking responsibility for an isolated aspect of three.

It might seem like a small point, but a decision made on the basis of convenience was undermining the farmers’ experience. I was able to call it to the attention of the facilitators, and help them get things back on track. It’s critically important that the farmers understand why they’re doing the experiments. The whole point is for them to take their findings and use them to make good decisions in their own fields.

Q. So much must depend on the extension workers.

A. They are really heroes. The time, the effort, the energy, the risks that they take—it’s inspiring. San Miguel is a large area, and the roads went from bad to worse during the time we were there. It was raining every day, and the fog and mud were incredible. Just to arrive at a community at a given time can be a huge feat. I have a very high regard for people working day in and day out under those conditions.

And this is all new to them. They are trained in traditional extension work, and what we’re trying do in the field schools is different. We’ve all had to learn a lot.

Q. Your training is as a laboratory scientist. Why are you so involved in the field schools?

A. My research is on plants and pathogens. Those are two legs of the so-called "disease triangle." The third leg is environment, and people are a huge part of that. In fact, when I draw the triangle, I always put people right in the middle. No matter what the problem is, farmers are the key to the solution.

Q. How did the farmers in the San Miguel area respond to late blight before they began taking part in the field schools?

A. One response was to stop planting at all in the wet season, when the late blight risk was simply too high. But the big problem with growing potatoes in the dry season is that yield depends on the availability of water. They also used fungicides, although not always very safely or effectively. They were generally familiar with the concept of resistant potato varieties but didn’t have access to the best materials.

Q. Have the field schools given them access?

A. That’s the idea. Starting two years ago, we introduced about a dozen varieties and breeding lines for testing in the field schools. Based in part on the farmers’ results, two new varieties were released through the national seed distribution system.

This year the field schools are testing 50 more potato clones. Those represent the best selections from about 50,000 seedlings tested by CIP in its own fields. The farmers help decide which become varieties. They’re also looking at a number of entries produced from true potato seed (seed taken from the berry of the plant)—a new concept for most of them.

Q. Are field schools essential to managing late blight, or are new varieties enough?

A. You need to know a lot in order to manage late blight—resistance, seed health, how the weather fits into the picture, and the epidemiology of the disease. You have to be able to predict how the disease will progress based on all those factors, and then you have to decide on a strategy. You can’t get that knowledge to people just by diffusing improved seed. You have to improve knowledge together with seed. Field schools are the best way I know of to do that.

There is also the issue of the durability of resistance. We can get resistant varieties to farmers, but that’s not the end of the story. Resistance has a long history of breaking down over time. Farmers have to know how to react if a crop they thought was resistant suddenly begins to show signs of a disease attack, and they have to have alternatives for the next season.

A good thing about the FFS approach is that farmers can decide what they want to know, and design experiments to provide answers. It’s a liberating methodology in that sense.

Q. What are the most important gaps in farmers’ knowledge about late blight?

A. One thing they don’t know is that late blight is caused by a microbe. If you don’t know that there’s a microbe involved, you can’t understand how the disease progresses. To use fungicides effectively you have to understand the idea of latent periods—the fact that the disease may be present at a given time, but not visible. Once farmers grasp that, they can be much better decision-makers.

They also don’t know much about fungicides. I watched one group sit in a circle with the extension worker and talk about the difference between commercial names and active ingredients. It was very enlightening for the farmers. They said they were routinely mixing fungicides, but they admitted that they didn’t really know what each one was meant to do. Sometimes they were just diluting the chemicals without realizing it.

Q. The field schools are meant in part to provide information for researchers. How good are the data being generated?

A. They’re very useful. Chata Roja was universally selected as the preferred variety in eight communities last year—we had no reason to predict that, but the findings were unequivocal. This year the farmers are evaluating a set of 50 new breeding lines. We’ll have results from 13 different locations. Those data will help us decide which are the most promising lines. Other experiments should help us improve computer simulation models we are developing to predict the way late blight will interact with certain environmental variables.

Another piece of data we get from the field schools is farmer opinion. How farmers respond to new varieties or new technologies is crucial to their success. Ideally, the field school is part of a feedback process, with farmers and researchers learning from one another.