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On-Farm Experimentation Community Info No. 50
Aug 3, 2026
Co-editor of the month
Thanks to my co-editor of the month, Dr. Ivan S. Adolwa, Farming Systems Scientist, African Plant Nutrition Institute, Nairobi, Kenya.
Empower-OFE: Empowering Farmer-centric Agricultural Transformation
For the longest time, farmers in the global south have been peripheral to agricultural innovation processes, relegated to mere recipients of technologies generated by external actors. Empower-OFE is a key flagship program of the African Plant Nutrition Institute (APNI) dedicated towards transforming African agricultural landscapes through farmer-centric approaches, models and methods. Find out more about what we are doing to empower farmers to be innovative agents of change here.
Reframing Innovation in African Agriculture: Why OFE is the game-changer
Many in the scientific community, particularly in Africa, conflate On-Farm Experimentation (OFE) with On-Farm Research (OFR). They fail to recognize the nuances that make farmer-led OFE stand-out in terms of shifting paradigms from researcher-led to farmer-led, entrenching co-creation and co-learning, enhancing relevance of agricultural technologies to farmers and accelerating scaling of relevant technologies. Find out more about these issues from excerpts of a peer-reviewed review article by APNI scientists and collaborators.
From the Ground Up: How Farmers are Shaping the Future of Agriculture in Kenya
In August 2025, APNI operationalized a fully-fledged farmer-led on-farm experimentation process (OFE 2.0), which will form part of the building blocks of a self-sustaining OFE service model in Kenya. The initiative commenced with stakeholder engagement meetings held on 11-22 August 2025 in western and eastern Kenya. An expanded network of > 200 OFE farmers who are experimenting with different technologies is now in place. Read more about this initiative here.
Driving Farmer-Centered Agricultural Transformation in Ghana
The Nutrient-Catalyzed Agricultural Transformation (NUTCAT) Project, led by the African Plant Nutrition Institute in collaboration with the CSIR – Savanna Agricultural Research Institute (SARI) and supported by Ghana’s Ministry of Food and Agriculture, was implemented from 2022 -2024 to address the problems of low cereal productivity in Ghana’s Northern and Middle Belt regions. At the core of this initiative was OFE, which ensured innovations generated were locally relevant and adoptable. Watch this video for more information on how OFE is transforming cereal systems in Ghana.
OFE improves nutrient management decision-making for East and West African Farmers
A recently published peer-reviewed paper shows the integral role of OFE in enhancing co-learning and improving yield and income outcomes in African smallholder farmer settings. This comparative study drawing on data from Kenya, Tanzania and Côte d’ Ivoire used a mixed methodology approach to evaluate farmer learning, nutrient management decision-making, and outcomes from their involvement with OFE under auspices of the NUTCAT project. You can find the open-source article here.
Reminder: Frontiers Special Issue on Farmer-Centric OFE
There's still time to contribute to this special issue on farmer-centric on-farm experimentation and digital agronomy. We welcome original research, reviews, methods, and perspectives. Submission deadline: February 28, 2027.
This letter was prepared by Louis Longchamps, co-chair of the ISPA OFE Community
Should you have something to share with the Community or the Community leaders, let us know here.