Farmer participatory evaluation and potential impact of a dominant male sterility gene (Ms44) for maize in Kenya

In this paper we present farmer evaluation of a dominant male sterile gene – Ms44 – for maize varieties in Kenya. More than 1000 farmers, 58% women, evaluated the varieties in 8 sites. Our results show that farmers have a wide range of criteria they use in evaluating maize varieties. These criteria do include tassel formation and pollen shed, for which they score Ms44 varieties lower than their conventional counterparts in the mid-season evaluation. This clearly shows farmers can distinguish the male sterility trait at midseason. They still preferred the Ms44 varieties over the others during the mid-season evaluation, because of higher scores on other criteria, inlcuding yield. At the end-season evaluation, tassel formation in Ms44 varieties does not receive a lower score, indicating the trait is no longer observable at harvest. On the methods, asking farmers about different criteria does affect their evaluation, so this type of studies needs to be carefully designed, as demonstrated here. Farmers tend to state many criteria as importance, while not making much distinction between them. Regression overall evaluation over evaluations of different individual criteria, however, shows a more nuanced story. Again, including different criteria affect the weight of the other criteria. Acknowledgement : We appreciate the support of the IMAs project in funding this research