Evolutionary Plant Breeding (EPB) represents a dynamic and inexpensive alternative breeding approach in which breeders and scientists partner with farmers and provide them with seeds of mixtures of a wide and diverse range of selected genetic material from national and international genebanks (including landraces, improved varieties, breeding lines, etc.) to plant in their fields. The concept of EPB emphasised decentralised participatory plant breeding targeted at helping resource-poor farmers, whereby seeds of varietal mixtures were planted and harvested continuously in the target environments, through natural selection and natural crossing in crops, the genetic composition of the crop population harvested changed continuously over generations. In this way, genotypes better adapted to changing climate trends and local environmental and farm conditions progressively became more frequent in the population. Subsequently, natural selection of the crop population supported by farmers’ selection and plant breeders’ supervision led to the evolution of a new population acting as ‘field gene banks’ within the farmers’ fields. These evolutionary populations (EPs) were expected to show greater adaptability and stability compared to single varieties. 

The overall goal of the project was to sustainably increase crop productivity and enhance the resilience to climate change of farming communities under low-input, rainfed, and less-favoured production conditions and organic production systems. The specific objective of the project was to enhance the resilience of target low-input farmers in the project area by developing EP populations with higher and more stable yields under the local farm agronomic and stress conditions, including drought, salinity, pests and diseases. 

The project was implemented in six different countries: Iran, Jordan, Nepal, Bhutan, Ethiopia and Uganda. It was expected that farmers in these countries would benefit directly from the deployment of evolutionary populations, which would reduce their vulnerability to production and income losses, and to climate year-to-year variability, and to environments of unsafe or excessive use of pesticides with positive effects on their health. LI-BIRD, in partnership with Nepal Agricultural Research Council (NARC), implemented the EPB Project in Nepal in two districts: Lamjung (mid-hill region, 800-1300 m a.s.l.) and Jumla, high hill region (2000-3000 m a.s.l.). The project worked on rice and common beans by incorporating germplasm from project sites, gene bank collections, research centres and seed actors from the relevant ecological and adaptation domains.