Participatory Varietal Selection

PVS works only with finished or near-finished cultivars: farmers select, grow, and evaluate existing varieties to find which they prefer, exploiting genetic variation that already exists. PPB goes further upstream, involving farmers in making crosses and selecting among segregating populations to create new varieties when no acceptable finished cultivar exists. Witcombe and colleagues framed PVS as the faster, cheaper option to try first, reserving the more resource-intensive PPB for cases where the needed variation must be bred rather than merely found.

Because selection happens where the variety must ultimately succeed and by the people who must adopt it. Farmers test candidates on their own fields under their own management and judge them by the full set of traits they value, so a variety that survives PVS already has demonstrated fitness and demand among real users. That built-in demand, combined with farmer-to-farmer seed exchange, lets PVS-identified varieties spread quickly, in contrast to top-down release where adoption is only discovered after the fact.

Both, deliberately. PVS records agronomic performance such as yield, often through anchored mother trials, but it gives equal standing to systematically elicited farmer preferences across maturity, quality, taste, marketability, and other traits. The two are combined, with trait weights coming from farmers, because adoption depends on the whole bundle of attributes rather than yield alone. Treating either source as sufficient on its own — pure yield ranking or pure opinion — would defeat the method's purpose of finding genuinely adoptable varieties.