Tackling misinformation in agriculture

Abstract

Farmers are encouraged to embrace digital media to fill the voids caused by the privatisation of Agricultural Knowledge and Information Systems. Widespread sustainable agriculture misinformation undermines the role of science, participatory research, and evidence-based decision making. Simply providing information is insufficient, misinformation is tackled by creating a network that fosters accurate information exchange. Here I used Twitter and blended learning technologies to create a research partnership with farmers based on their beliefs that earthworms indicate good soils management. Through co-design, farmers transformed this symbol into a systematic field observation network, assessing earthworm populations to the ecological group level. Our community (#WorldWormWeek) revealed the falsehoods in misinformation such as: "Farmers around the world have been turning their fields into subterranean deserts". This social learning network was resilient to further misinformation by the national press. Real data trends were fundamentally different to predictions made by science advancing models of global earthworm populations. Anecic earthworms (including middens) were absent in 1 in 5 fields, directly informing management practices to avoid soil biological pitfalls in no-tillage adoption. Simplistic earthworm counts to indicate soil health are rendered obsolete, a depth of information exchange can be achieved by building science-farmer partnerships using digital communications and co-designed frameworks. However, the scientific consensus, whilst generally positive about the research impact, revealed 42 % scientists rated this research as "not at all useful" or "slightly useful" to scientists. This reveals the hopeless situation where the co-production of knowledge and feedback loop linking farming-science is not broadly considered science advancing, and brought #Wormscience to an end. The next step would have been to optimize Lumbricus terrestris biocontrol actions targeting the soil-borne crop pathogen Fusarium spp. and detoxification of its mycotoxins, to reduce fungicide dependency in staple crop production; aligned with societal sustainable agriculture aspirations.