Mother-Baby Trial Design
The mother-baby trial design is an on-farm experimental architecture, formalized by Sieglinde Snapp in 2002, that resolves the long-standing tension between statistical rigor and wide farmer participation in agricultural research. A small number of replicated 'mother' trials carry the complete set of treatments under good management and provide the controlled, analyzable comparison; surrounding them, a large number of simple 'baby' trials, each on a farmer's own field and each testing only a subset of the treatments against the farmer's usual practice, sample the real variation in conditions and capture farmer evaluation at scale. Linking the two — the mother for precision, the babies for breadth and realism — yields both defensible treatment estimates and credible evidence about how technologies perform and are judged across many real farms.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Snapp, S. (2002). Quantifying Farmer Evaluation of Technologies: The Mother and Baby Trial Design. In M. R. Bellon & J. Reeves (Eds.), Quantitative Analysis of Data from Participatory Methods in Plant Breeding (pp. 9-17). Mexico, DF: CIMMYT. · URL
- Witcombe, J. R., Joshi, A., Joshi, K. D., & Sthapit, B. R. (1996). Farmer Participatory Crop Improvement. I. Varietal Selection and Breeding Methods and Their Impact on Biodiversity. Experimental Agriculture, 32(4), 445-460. · DOI 10.1017/S0014479700001526
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.