2019 ASHS Annual Conference

The Trellis Fund is a grant making and capacity building initiative within the Horticulture Innovation Lab. Trellis connects organizations in lower-income countries with U.S. graduate students from Horticulture Innovation Lab partner institutions who have agricultural expertise, generating benefits for both the students and the in-country institutions. Together, they collaborate on short-term projects to address horticultural challenges faced by local farmers. Selected organizations each receive small grants for a variety of projects along the horticulture value chain, including production, postharvest, marketing, and consumption, that will help smallholder farmers improve how they grow or sell fruit and vegetable crops. The Trellis Fund aims to empower smallholder farmers with new information as well as build long standing relationships between host organizations and budding U.S. researchers.

The Trellis Fund program objectives are related to: providing organizational capacity building for local organizations working on issues along the horticultural value chain; promoting the technical extension capacity of local organizations working on horticulture to provide scientifically valid information to their beneficiaries; providing scientifically valid extension information to local smallholder farmers and/or other horticultural stakeholders; and engaging U.S. graduate students in international agricultural development. Trellis has demonstrated how young scientists can meaningfully contribute to and collaborate around the goals, development and capacity of small organizations abroad. Graduate students have benefited from Trellis in terms of career development, and local organizations have been able to more effectively deliver evidence-based extension information to producers. Another unique facet of the Trellis Fund is that it is a program completely designed, implemented, and evaluated by graduate students at the University of California, Davis.

Trellis has been in existence since 2011 and over six rounds, it has funded 76 local organizations, engaged 77 U.S. graduate students, and trained almost 12,000 individuals (over ⅔ women). The program structure and history, key successes and challenges, and goals for the future will be shared. We believe in the Trellis model and have seen its impact on both organizations and graduate students. Trellis was designed to be easily duplicated by other universities and organizations and could be scaled up or down. Eager to see the model spread so that more graduate students and organizations get the opportunity to collaborate on projects, information on how other institutions could leverage their own horticultural resources, partnerships, and expertise to implement a program similar to Trellis will also be discussed.