A participatory approach was used to improve smallholder tomato farmers’ understanding of and access to soil health monitoring in the Morogoro Region of Tanzania. Baseline soil characteristics were gathered from 50 tomato fields in the region, local soil knowledge was elicited from farmers and used to develop a soil health card to qualitatively assess soil health, and farmers (n = 32) were trained on the use of a low-cost soil test kit to quantitatively assess soil health. Farmers most often described local indicators of soil health in terms of soil texture and tilth, soil color, soil water relations, and soil fertility. Following use of the soil test kit, farmers indicated increased awareness of soil testing services (Wilcoxon signed rank Z = –3.0, P = 0.001), more agreed they had access to soil testing services (Z = –2.7, P = 0.004), and more agreed that soil management recommendations were easy to understand (Z = –3.4, P < 0.0001) compared with pre-exposure results. Farmers continued to use the soil health test kit and soil health card based on a follow-up survey administered 1 year after project completion. Participatory soil health monitoring projects can improve farmers’ ability to monitor and manage soil health, potentially impacting sustained soil and plant health.

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Evaluation is a necessary component of plant health programs designed for and implemented in research, extension, and international development settings. Outcome Mapping is a method of program planning, observation, and assessment in which changes in behavior, relationships, or actions of the target groups (boundary partners) are evaluated during program implementation. Outcome Mapping was used to evaluate stakeholder participation in participatory variety selection trials for tomato and soil health training for tomato farmers in Tanzania. Boundary partner participation varied between the three villages evaluated and predicted adoption of new varieties assessed one year later. Outcome Mapping was valuable in tracking progress during program implementation and can indicate long-term impacts of the program. Accepted for publication 21 November 2016.

Tomato is an important cash crop in many developing countries. However, smallholder farmers often lack access to improved cultivars and breeding programs to develop locally adapted cultivars are limited. Participatory crop improvement (PCI) approaches can be used to increase farmer access to improved cultivars. In this project, we used the mother and baby trial (MBT) design to introduce and evaluate tomato cultivars in three villages in the Morogoro Region of Tanzania. Mother trials were conducted in seven environments within the three villages, and variance partitioning revealed significant genetic effects for all traits measured with h2 ranging from 0.74 to 0.90 for yield and disease reaction, respectively. In baby trials, farmers provided qualitative rankings of cultivars for 16 characteristics, including vigor, yield, harvest period, diseases, insect damage, fruit quality, and salability. Results from baby trials indicated that introduced cultivars were locally acceptable to farmers, except for traits related to marketability. Outcome Mapping was used to evaluate progress in each of the three villages and results suggested that high stakeholder participation levels could predict future adoption of introduced cultivars. Our findings provide a framework for evaluating, selecting, and breeding tomato and other horticultural crops in developing countries using the MBT design for PCI.

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