Farmer participatory approach to utilize landraces and local cultivars for germplasm conservation

Abstract

The attitude toward landraces has been changing in recent years, as improved cultivars have not always proved to be superior, for example in marginal environments or under specific socioeconomic conditions (Ceccarelli et al. 1992). Landraces are sometimes also preferred by farmers for quality aspects (Dhamotharan et al. 1997). Thus, a new interest has arisen to use traditional landraces as such, or in breeding programmes for further enhancement. Our objective was not only to document the farmers’ knowledge together with each sample, but also to actively involve the farmers in the identification of landraces and representative samples to be collected. Involving farmers in the collecting of germplasm could avoid unnecessary cost of evaluation, because some of the information required might already be known among the present users. In this approach we propose that farmers’ knowledge could help to identify samples that are most representative of a landrace, and also to classify and use landrace collections more efficiently. So our ultimate objective is to enhance diversity, quality and productivity of farmers by using various genetic resources of different crops.