At the intersection of plant breeding and social justice, Dr. Hale Ann Tufan is redesigning agricultural research to reflect the people it serves.
On the final day of last week’s National Association for Plant Breeding (NAPB) conference in Kona, Hawai’i, Dr. Hale Ann Tufan looked out over a thinning crowd and smiled. “There’s nothing like gender equality to bring the crowd in, right?” she said.
It’s a familiar moment for the associate professor at Cornell’s School of Integrative Plant Science—standing at the edge of two worlds. One is genetics and plant breeding, rooted in empirical precision. The other is power, identity, and human behavior—nuanced, subjective, and deeply embedded in the very structure of our food systems.
Tufan doesn’t flinch at the complexity. She thrives in it.
Tufan leads the Equitable Agricultural Research Lab (EQUAL) at Cornell University, where she collaborates with plant breeders, social scientists, and policymakers to reimagine what agricultural innovation looks like—and who it serves. Her work spans molecular plant pathology, gender research in Sub-Saharan Africa, and systems-level studies of food access and technology adoption.
For Tufan, it starts with a simple but jarring truth: gender inequalities are baked into global agri-food systems.
“After five decades of research, we can say with confidence—gender inequality in agriculture is pervasive. There are no exceptions,” she says. “And at the root of it all is power.”
This inequality manifests in everything from land access and labor roles to how new crop varieties are developed. It’s not just about what gets planted. It’s about who decides what gets planted, whose needs are considered in the design of new varieties, and whose data is collected and acted on.
The Invisible Farmer
In one of her flagship studies, Tufan partnered with Senegal’s national breeding program to explore a deceptively simple question: How do farmers make decisions together?
Her team collected detailed household data—age, marital status, decision-making patterns—and ran cluster analyses to group families into distinct household typologies. One type might feature younger couples with limited resources and power imbalances; another might highlight households where women actively participate in both production and financial decisions.
These differences weren’t just social. They directly affected which crop traits were prioritized. In less empowered households, women valued basic yield. In households where women had more control, traits like biomass yield—used for animal feed—emerged as key.
“In plant breeding, we talk about ‘target environments,’” Tufan says. “But we rarely talk about target households. And that matters.”
A New Lens on Technology Adoption
Another of Tufan’s studies took her team to Costa Rica, where they challenged conventional methods of tracking seed adoption. Normally, researchers sample from “bean grower lists”—lists overwhelmingly dominated by men.
But what happens when women are also managing plots, making decisions, or saving seed?
Tufan’s team developed a dual-interview method, identifying both the primary and secondary decision-makers in each household and matching them with DNA fingerprinting of the actual crops in the field.
What they found was both intuitive and groundbreaking: being more intentional about who you speak with drastically improves the accuracy of varietal adoption data.
“Too often, our datasets have a default male bias,” Tufan says. “And if you can’t see women in your data, you can’t serve them with your science.”
Seed Systems with Soul
In rural Tanzania, cassava is exchanged hand-to-hand, neighbor-to-neighbor. It’s a seed system built on trust, not formal transactions. Yet, when development initiatives came in to build community seed banks, women were largely left out.
Tufan’s team turned to participatory action learning—community conversations, listening sessions, and co-design. By reworking how community leaders engaged with women and youth, the project saw a 70% increase in women participating in seed production and exchange.
“This isn’t just a gender project,” she emphasizes. “It’s innovation design—done with context, with care, and with community.”
Changing the System from Within
Beyond fieldwork, Tufan is shaking the foundations of how agricultural science itself operates. Her lab has published on topics ranging from the gender dynamics within interdisciplinary research teams to the invisible toll of caregiving on women faculty in plant breeding.
One scoping review she co-led looked at trait prioritization studies in crop breeding over the past 50 years. Fewer than 30% included data from women. That silence, she argues, speaks volumes.
“We’ve been breeding crops for the default user—usually male, usually commercial,” she says. “But what about the woman in Uganda who’s cooking beans over firewood, or the grandmother in Guatemala who saves seed each season? They’re part of the system too.”
In an age of climate disruption, food insecurity, and digital transformation, Tufan believes the future of agriculture doesn’t lie in a single gene or data set—it lies in plurality.
Plurality of people. Of perspectives. Of voices at the table.
“We can’t airdrop innovation and expect transformation,” she says. “We need to think about bundling the biological with the social—because that’s how real impact happens.”
