Save Native Seeds
75% of the world’s food is generated from only 12 plants and 5 animal species. Biological diversity in agriculture is a result of interactions between genetic resources, environmental management systems, and farmer practices embedded in indigenous knowledge. Saving and sourcing native seeds facilitates adaptation to our changing climate because farmers can evaluate which seed will thrive under different climate stressors (floods, droughts), and select as needed depending on the prevailing weather. Native seeds safeguard livelihoods and improve local ecosystems. It is a win for farmers, their land, and our planet. So what is slowing the adoption of farming methods that foster agrobiodiversity?
Let's go on a 'Behavior-centered Design' journey and discover how we can promote Behavior #1 among farmers.
Identify the actors, behaviors, and context
Farming practices have historical, social, cultural, and environmental dimensions, which are in turn embedded in a complex macroeconomic milieu of international trade agreements, country specific land tenure arrangements, minimum support price mechanisms, subsidies, and inadequate access to credit.
What is the problem?
Agrobiodiversity is declining and climate change is making it worse.
This means reduced crop diversity; inputs required by non-native seeds also quicken soil degradation, and compromise farmers’ overall adaptive capacity to respond to climate impact.
Who is contributing i.e., the actors and institutions?
Smallholder farmers, Governments, Agribusinesses, Extensionists
What are the actors doing or not doing i.e., behaviors contributing to the problem?
Seed selection by farmers is ad hoc and often not based on weather patterns. Seed storage too is either ad-hoc or pre-determined by commercial seed companies. State extensionists do not encourage the use of native seeds.
What do we want actors to do i.e., the target behavior?
Save native seeds individually as well as exchange seeds already conserved by the community over generations. Celebrate indigenous knowledge of types of seeds and their suitability to variations in climate stressors.
Understanding farmers’ motivations and barriers
Match the correct phrases to the question
Understanding farmers’ motivations and barriers brings us to the task of building hypotheses. Let us examine our data collected during the ‘Empathize’ step, but this time with a behavioral lens. Which elements, if changed, might take farmers closer to saving and sourcing native seeds?
What do we know about life on land today?
Click on any box to identify the behavioral insight behind common trends in farmer behavior.
Smallholder farmers in developing contexts are less likely to adopt technologies and inputs they haven’t yet encountered or seen peer farmers use successfully.
This is Uncertainty Aversion
The already-precarious nature of agrarian livelihoods make farmers especially averse to more uncertainty in the form of untested (for them) innovations.
Farmers postpone investing into soil regeneration as a present-day savings measure.
This is Hyperbolic Discounting
Soil degradation is an effect of short-term thinking. The longitudinal effects of high-input agriculture on soils are understood but farmers discount the (slow) future cost of declining soil health and increased vulnerability to climate change.
The possibility of new practices or inputs failing is experienced more keenly than their potential to succeed.
This is Loss Aversion
This possibility of loss shapes farmer decision making to a greater extent than the (equal) possibility of gain and improvement in life conditions.
Farmers are reluctant to experiment with new methods, or change their existing ways of doing things, even with the provision of subsidies.
This is Status Quo Bias
Farmers prefer to stick to what they know. Keeping things the same promises stability in a world that is made deeply unstable by a changing climate, fluctuations in crop prices, and now, a global pandemic.
Farmers selectively turn to instances of failure to justify their rejection of climate smart practices such as calibration of inputs, composting, use of climate information or reduced water use.
This is Confirmation Bias
A tendency to focus on, emphasize, and recall information that confirms prior convictions, and to downplay or ignore information that challenges them.
How farmers’ peers are practising agriculture shapes the choices and preferences of the farming community writ large.
This is Conformity Bias
Predominant social norms push the adoption of practices because humans tend to take cues from the social groups to which they belong for attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.
If we change...
Understanding farmers’ motivations and barriers brings us to the task of building hypotheses. Let us examine our data collected during the ‘Empathize’ step, but this time with a behavioral lens. Which elements, if changed, might take farmers closer to saving and sourcing native seeds?
This is a good moment to identify the relationship between program activities and the final outcomes we seek.
This is where you are now, strategizing about possible interventions.
Programs Activities.
Shift in psychological or social changes result from program activities...
Psycho-Social States
Behaviors
...will generate behavioral outcomes
Target Behaviors will consolidate over time to create
Enviromental and Social Outcomes
Understanding the psycho-social states we want to create through program activities will produce stronger hypotheses for behavior change.
If we change [ the belief that saving native seeds is not worthwhile ], we can create [ feelings of community pride ] which in turn will [ promote saving native seeds ].
Leveraging emotions like pride and belonging is a key behavioral principle. Human decision making is driven by how an action makes us feel or connects to personal interests and concerns.
Learn more about how to build a psycho-social theory of change.
Solutions from around the world
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Reviving Ancestral Farming Practices through Behavioral Science
In 2017, Rare’s BE.Center launched the Farming for Biodiversity project, which combined a global Solution Search contest with a series of behavior change trainings to identify and replicate promising approaches for biodiversity-friendly agriculture. After attending one of these trainings, called Campaigning for Conservation, Mexican organization Centro de Investigación y Servicios Profesionales A.C. (CISERP) launched a year-long social marketing campaign to promote the revitalization and re-adoption of indigenous agricultural practices.
CISERP is working to re-popularize the traditional milpa system in a community called Tojtic in Mexico’s Chiapas state. Milpa is a traditional intercropping system consisting of beans, squash and maize i.e., Las Tres Hermanas or 'The Three Sisters', now under threat from commercial crops that promise larger yields at the cost of long term soil depletion and loss of biodiversity
CISERP's collaboration with the BE.Center identified three target behaviors: promoting the use of native seeds; reducing chemical fertilizers; and composting organic waste.
CISERP communicated the importance of native seeds and ancestral agroecological methods by harnessing indigenous pride in their knowledge of the land which is part and parcel of their cultural identity. Puppet shows and comics drew children into an early appreciation of local agriculture.
CISERP’s seed fairs provided a venue for farmers to exchange native seeds with one another. Nutritional fairs invited women in the community to prepare dishes using milpa ingredients, and share recipes with their neighbors.
Tojtic is an example of how one community chose to address the challenge of promoting the adoption of native seeds. This Step in the ‘Behavior-Centered Design’ journey is about brainstorming a range of possible ideas for solutions. You are ready to move to the next step when you have a prioritized list of solutions related to the target behavior i.e., saving native seeds.
Next, you can develop a prototype (small-scale version) that captures your solution’s essential features without investing too much time or resources. You are ready to move to the next step when you have a prototype with the essential features of your chosen intervention.
Test your prototype and gain feedback on the solution from your target audience. It’s important to validate or invalidate your hypotheses about what motivates behavior and gain feedback to improve your solution.You might have to gain more insights and test your solution more than once before launching the solution at scale.
So you’re here, with an idea for a solution to ‘Save a greater variety of seeds’. What happens next?
65%
65% of milpa farmers committed to participating in a five-year seed conservation program. This program ensures these renewed practices will not fade from one season to another.
324
Number of indigenous farmers in year long campaign to promote native seeds saving.
80%
259 of the 324 farmers began using, sharing, and exchanging native seeds. This represented a 45 percentage point increase, meaning that 80% of the targeted farmers were now participating in traditional seed conservation practices and increasing the biodiversity of their farms.
65%
65% of milpa farmers increased their production and consumption of milpa crops. Planting and consuming more maize, beans and squash increased the biodiversity of the farmers' plots and the nutritional value of their diets.