The Conservation, Food and Health Foundation renews its vote of confidence in Bioleft as a transformative tool in the transition to a healthier, fairer and more sustainable world, where food security is guaranteed for all people, with respect for the environment and biodiversity.
The objectives of The Conservation, Food and Health Foundation are to protect natural resources, improve food production and distribution, and promote public health in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. To this end, it collaborates with capacity building in these regions by awarding grants that it distributes through competitions, launched every six months. Bioleft won one of these grants in 2019, and with it launched a participatory breeding project involving producers and breeders, with three field experiments.
The project is growing and becoming more and more important as farming times allow information to be gathered. On Friday, May 29, the foundation announced that Bioleft’s proposal was again chosen among hundreds to win the grant. This will allow the second stage of the experiments to move forward, towards a collaborative innovation system that connects existing capacities and empowers the work of producers and breeders through collective knowledge.
El proyecto crece y se hace cada vez más importante a medida que los tiempos de la agricultura permiten recabar información. El viernes 29 de mayo, la fundación se comunicó para anunciar que la propuesta de Bioleft volvió a ser elegida entre cientos para ganar el subsidio. Esto permitirá avanzar en la segunda etapa de los experimentos, de cara a un sistema de innovación colaborativa que conecte entre sí las capacidades existentes y potencie el trabajo de productorxs y mejoradorxs a través del conocimiento colectivo.
The project
Bioleft seeks to support diverse and sustainable agricultural practices, whose seed needs are often left out of the offer of traditional seed companies, with knowledge and appropriate plant varieties. We are currently working on three experiments with corn, tomato and forage varieties from public institutions -INTA and University of Buenos Aires- that were transferred with Bioleft open licenses to producers with diverse agricultural practices in different areas of Argentina. The corn seeds were sown in organic farms by members of the Argentine Movement for Organic Production (MAPO) in Córdoba. The forage seeds were sown using agroecological practices by members of the National Network of Municipalities and Communities that Promote Agroecology (RENAMA) in Baradero, province of Buenos Aires. The tomato seeds, old creole seeds provided by the Al rescate del tomate criollo project of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, were tested with biological-dynamic management in General Rodríguez, Buenos Aires.
These experiments have agronomic objectives: to test the varieties that are openly transferred and to obtain high-value information to add to a participatory breeding process. But they also, and above all, have social innovation purposes. The human networks that are woven into the process are at least as valuable as the agronomic information. And the core of the project is to build these networks, supported by a technological platform that optimizes exchanges and information gathering.
Based on the experiments, in January 2020 we held workshops with the producers and breeders involved – segmented by crop – to understand how they work and explore how the network could help them optimize this work. In these workshops we co-designed the variables to be included in the field notebook for each crop, a key element of the Bioleft platform, as this is where agronomic information is collected for participatory breeding.
These were very rich meetings, which triggered new hypotheses and research plans. With this new support from The Conservation, Food and Health, we will be able to advance along these lines: expand the scale of the experiments by multiplying more seeds and involving more producers and breeders; continue developing, testing and improving the field notebook; add an experiment with another crop and also deepen the collaboration with the team that is implementing Bioleft in Mexico.
The Bioleft team is happy to work with an organization of the impact and trajectory of The Conservation, Food and Health Foundation because of the objectives we share, which we have believed in from day one: biological, economic and social diversity, and food and technological sovereignty.