Identification of Gendered Trait Preferences among Rice Producers Using the G+ Breeding Tools: Implications for Rice Improvement in Ghana

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Manuscript: 210708

Title: Identification of gendered trait preferences among rice producers using the G+ breeding tools: Implications for rice development in Ghana

 

In this research Frimpong et al. employed the G+ breeding tool to understand the relative importance of desired traits in rice as affected by gender. Although I am certain a lot information interesting information are being conveyed through this study, the way they are presented make the take home message difficult to capture. Basically, the way the data were analyzed and presented did not offer a strong insight into the ultimately most important traits. Indeed, end-users such as farmers will always choose variety considering/integrating (concomitantly) a set a criterion such as agronomic traits, marketing/consumer traits. No farmers will accept a high yielding variety that is hardly marketable (because for instance of its low grain flagrance). But in this paper, the authors analyzed all traits separately. I would rather strongly suggest, all traits’ categories be merged and reanalyzed producers’ choice. For instance, is the tolerance. What is the relative importance of a trait such as the plant height vis-à-vis another trait such as the grain shape?

Authors should also  give price to the use of Kendal coefficient to evaluate the level of agreement, but also the significance of the agreement rather than just reporting proportion of this or that?

 

Below are some more specific comments.

 

Introduction

 

Lines 51 -54: Authors can be more precise by giving some specific examples.

 

Methodology:

Authors need to add a box to provide more details about the G+ breeding tools.

Line 128: replace “ws” by “was”

Line 185: replace “was” by “were” as data is a plural noun

 

Results

Line 277: Please rephase as: In average, rice farmers were 46 ± xxx years old; and replace xxxx by the standard deviation value.

 

Across the manuscript, please replace female by women and Male by men.

 

Across the manuscript, please use USD as currency or provide equivalence of GH in USD.

 

Line 320: Figure 3 of page 10: the legend “total” does not convey any relevant information given the figure’s title. Kindly remove it.

 

Line 327 – 328:  Please remove the part “according to the…of 0.650”. You are just repeating the information in the first part of the sentence.

 

Line 344: what does “tolerance to poor soil conditions” entail?

 

Authors should properly renumber Figures across the manuscript to ease the readers’ understanding. Several figures (e.g., Figure 3, Figure 4) were repeated but with different contents.

 

All Tables gave to be announced before being used. This was not the case of a number them (Table 7, Table 8, Table 9, etc.). They were dropped after the section title without prior indication of their contents.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

 

Thank you

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a commendable and very informative study with respect to improving rice production and rice technology adoption in Ghana.

There is need to revisit the assertions made in the results section for congruence with the presented findings. A case in point is in the paragraph 414 to 425 which does not seem to speak to the table 4. For instance, jasmine does not seem to have been grown by male youth. The preferences of the females are also not presented/discussed.

The authors mention among other objectives that the research sought to test the robustness of the use of the G+ tools verses the conventional (line 81/82). It is not clear from the methods how robustness and the comparison with the conventional tool is assessed. Thus there are no results presented to this end.

Take note of typos listed below:

Is Rx-Baika the same as Ex-Baika?

Line 128 has a typo

Line 419...by adult men- the word 'adult' is missing

Line 567 has a typo

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

 

Thank you.

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

1- Be consistent with the use of "end-users". Different spellings were used for end-users across the manuscript.

2- Line 218: Replace "ender users" by end-users"

3- Reduce the excess of space between words. e.g. (see lines 148, 149) 

Author Response

Please see attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.doc