Breaking the Tuber Barrier: Farmer-Led Clonal Propagation as a Scalable Pathway for Expanded Ube (Dioscorea alata) Cultivation

Ube (Dioscorea alata), a culturally significant and economically valuable crop in the Philippines, faces a key bottleneck in scaling production because of its reliance on tubers as planting material. Traditional tuber-based propagation is costly and inefficient and limits expansion, while tissue culture offers promise but remains prohibitively expensive and technically demanding for farmer cooperatives. This