Promoting sustainable smallholder farming via multistakeholder collaboration

作者：Zhichao An, Yi Yang, Xue Yang, Wenqi Ma, Wei Jiang, Yajuan Li, Guangfeng Chen, Weifeng Zhang, Minghao Zhuang, Chong Wang, Fusuo Zhang · 发表于：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1073/pnas.2319519121 · 被引用次数：50 · 研究领域：Agriculture Sustainability and Environmental Impact、Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development、Agricultural Systems and Practices

Transforming smallholder farms is critical to global food security and environmental sustainability. The science and technology backyard (STB) platform has proved to be a viable approach in China. However, STB has traditionally focused on empowering smallholder farmers by transferring knowledge, and wide-scale adoption of more sustainable practices and technologies remains a challenge. Here, we report on a long-term project focused on technology scale-up for smallholder farmers by expanding and upgrading the original STB platform (STB 2.0). We created a formalized and standardized process by which to engage and collaborate with farmers, including integrating their feedback via equal dialogues in the process of designing and promoting technologies. Based on 288 site-year of field trials in three regions in the North China Plain over 5 y, we find that technologies cocreated through this process were more easily accepted by farmers and increased their crop yields and nitrogen factor productivity by 7.2% and 28.1% in wheat production and by 11.4% and 27.0% in maize production, respectively. In promoting these technologies more broadly, we created a "one-stop" multistakeholder program involving local government agencies, enterprises, universities, and farmers. The program was shown to be much more effective than the traditional extension methods applied at the STB, yielding substantial environmental and economic benefits. Our study contributes an important case study for technolog...