Participatory Variety Selection (PVS) has been carried out for several decades in the global South. Many countries require data from on-farm trials to support the official release of new varieties. However, PVS has proven to be a highly problematic approach in the agricultural sciences. Even though it is often promoted as indispensable to ensure farmers´ perspectives are taken into account, in practice its results are used sparingly by breeders and perceived to be of limited value (Sumberg et al., 2013, Cobb et al., 2019). Over the last decade, I have led an effort to redesign on-farm trials to address this issue. Here, I briefly describe this design journey, starting with sketching the problem ―or rather the paradox — that we tried to address, how citizen science offers a new ‘frame’ for this paradox, and how we developed a citizen science approach for on-farm expe- rimentation.