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44 SEEDWORLD.COM JUNE 2016 INTERNATIONALAGRICULTURALDEVELOPMENT DENNIS THOMPSON is dedicated to delivering solutions and empowering people and organiza- tions to solve complex problems related to international agricul- tural development and global food security. His career experience and international credentials include Extension educa- tion agronomy and administration. Findeis team focuses on soybean value chain issues in Mozambique while Ragsdales does so in Ghana. Initial findings in Mozambique indicate that only 17 percent of women compared to 42 percent of men are engaged in the full range of food crop decision-making. Findeis is implementing an intensive Soy Uptake and Network Survey to better understand the role of networks in soybean adoption which includes family consumption and commercial production. The Soybean Innovation Lab is designed to help improve food security and household nutrition sustainable agricultural productivity and economic empowerment by providing farmers with income. The partnership between the applied social science team and agricultural bench science colleagues within the Soybean Innovation Lab has been effective. Early in her career Ragsdale learned first-hand just how embedded women are within agricultural systems especially in low-resource and developing countries as farmers and mothers producers and consumers. Read-Wahidi provides a more holistic under- standing of daily lives of male and female farmers. When shared with the non-sociocultural members of the research team all become better positioned to improve the lives of the target population. We get to talk to the farmers spend time in the villages and understand peoples lives beyond their crop yields and cost of production says Read-Wahidi. Agricultural development conundrums such as this in Ghana are not isolated incidents. Their presence sends a clear message to seed industry representatives contemplating bold market development initiatives in uncharted waters. Soybean primarily a commercial non-native non-staple labor-intensive crop in sub- Saharan Africa can serve as a good case study. One must first determine if and how a given crop kind might fit within a culture and lifestyle. Then the focus can shift to determining the agronomic and environmental fit. In the end biological sciences and good business practices likely will prevail however the impact on human life might be achieved more quickly when credence is given to the work of colleagues from the social science field and allowed to supplement con- tributions from biological and bench science. SW THE GHANAIAN WOMAN farmer simply laughed at any thought of switching her soy plot with that of her husbands maize plot for the next planting season. Neither questioning nor considering the potential bio- logical benefits commonly associated with rotational corn-soybean crop management systems she rejected the concept. But why Size quality and location all add to the prestige associated with ones plot thus the price of rotating crops might actually be more costly than the price of not rotating suggests Mary Read-Wahidi a Mississippi State University postdoctoral research fellow. Not all costs can be measured in currency. Access to land for female farmers in many develop- ing lands is often controlled by the husband. However men must first receive a land allocation from village leaders. Women generally end up with the smaller more distant and less productive fields. The common practice of plural marriage in rural areas further compli- cates the land tenure system in much of sub-Saharan Africa according to Kathleen Ragsdale a Mississippi State University associate research professor. The ramifications of gender and household dynam- ics of the statement rotate your soy plot next season with your husbands maize plot might well over- shadow any biological benefit that could be obtained from rotating corn and soybean fields. The English term acre is often found to have different meanings in various regions of Ghana. Consumer discussions about soya foods become fuzzy until one realizes that it depicts a specific prepared dish as opposed to being a broad term describing foods that contain soy. Might other production use or storage practices based on conventional thinking be similarly skewed Understanding Culture Ragsdale and Read-Wahidi are joined by Jill Findeis a University of Missouri professor of agricultural and applied economics. They comprise the socio-economic research team within The Feed the Future Soybean Innovation Lab led by the University of Illinois. Their research probes sustainability asset ownership and allocation to soybean labor allocation decision-making and soybean income control along gender lines. She Just Laughed