Advancing inclusive on-farm testing approaches to facilitate maize breakthrough product development in sub-Saharan Africa

Developing breakthrough products that deliver at least 25% improvements in productivity in farmers’ fields requires that breeding pipelines more closely align with farmers’ and end-user needs and the target population of environments (TPEs). In the case of maize, climate change is accelerating climatic shifts within the TPE, potentially limiting future realised genetic gain. On-farm breeding approaches can play a valuable role in supporting breeding programs transitioning towards breakthrough products. Increased sampling of the TPE by moving selection into farmers’ fields can overcome the challenges of climatic changes within the TPE and extensive farmer diversity, whilst providing information to refine managed environment trials designed to sample the TPE. This review highlights advances in inclusive host farmer sampling, sparse testing strategies and phenotyping to facilitate scaling of on-farm testing within breeding pipelines.