Author: Mike Listman

EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) — Focusing on the rapid advance in technologies to observe and record plant growth using technologies such as drones and automated sensors, 200 world-class scientists from over 20 countries will gather in Mexico from December 13 to 15 for the 4^th International Plant Phenotyping Symposium.

Aiming to make breeding for food crops faster and more effective, experts will share news on the latest tools to measure plant traits and, combined with cutting-edge genetics and statistics, sharpen their understanding of how crops adapt to the environment.

“The ‘phenotype’ is the observable physical traits and behavior of an organism” said Matthew Reynolds, distinguished scientist and wheat physiologist at the Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) which, together with the International Plant Phenotyping Network, is organizing and hosting the event.

“In plant breeding, measuring crop traits in the field is largely prerequisite to genetic analyses,” Reynolds added. “A new generation of high-throughput phenotyping technologies based on remote sensing represents a giant step forward.”

DNA-based technologies such as molecular markers have immense potential to hone selection or provide useful information about target traits, according to Reynolds. “But now a revolution in plant phenotyping is taking place, using non-invasive technologies based on reflected light and near-light radiation from plant tissue, to assess the vigor and performance of crop trials,” he explained. “These developments promise to dramatically expand the scale and speed of phenotyping as well as the application of molecular tools in breeding.”

Bucking trends, boosting breeding gains

Trends suggest that crop breeding must gear up to feed a rapidly rising and more prosperous global population, but that breeding impacts are increasingly constrained by changing climates and new, more deadly crop diseases. “In the case of wheat, for example, yields must grow by at least 1.4 percent each year from now to 2030 to avoid critical food shortages, but since the 1990s, wheat’s yield growth rate has been far below that, at around 0.5 percent per year,” Reynolds said.

Emerging phenotyping technologies include automated or remote-controlled devices, such as field-level sensors, drone-mounted cameras or even satellites. As one example, experts from the John Innes Centre and the Earlham Institute in Britain will describe one such automated system they use to capture high-resolution data on crop growth, for plotting and analysis against detailed environmental data using cutting-edge models.

Interpreting plant images from remote sensors has proven a challenge. University of Nebraska scientists will present alternatives based on mathematical measurement and analysis of the volume of a plant’s silhouette and above-ground structure.

“In addition to learning from each other’s experiences, a half day is dedicated to drafting position papers on priority areas for future research,” Reynolds said. “Finally, a keynote talk and discussion will consider ways to harmonize the many phenotyping platforms that have emerged in recent years.”

Click here to view or download the book of abstracts of the event.

EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) — Recent media reports show that the 19 million inhabitants of New Delhi are under siege from a noxious haze generated by traffic, industries, cooking fires and the burning of over 30 million tons of rice straw on farms in the neighboring states of Haryana and Punjab.

However, farmers who rotate wheat and rice crops in their fields and deploy a sustainable agricultural technique known as “zero tillage” can make a significant contribution to reducing smog in India’s capital, helping urban dwellers breathe more easily.

Since the 1990s, scientists at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) have been working with national partners and advanced research institutes in India to test and promote reduced tillage which allows rice-wheat farmers of South Asia to save money, better steward their soil and water resources, cut greenhouse gas emissions and stop the burning of crop residues.

The key innovation involves sowing wheat seed directly into untilled soil and rice residues in a single tractor pass, a method known as zero tillage. Originally deemed foolish by many farmers and researchers, the practice or its adaptations slowly caught on and by 2008 were being used to sow wheat by farmers on some 1.8 million hectares in India.

Scientists and policymakers are promoting the technique as a key alternative for residue burning and to help clear Delhi’s deadly seasonal smog.

Burning soils the air, depletes the soil

“Rice-wheat rotations in Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan account for nearly a quarter of the world’s food production and constitute a key source of grain and income in South Asia, home to more than 300 million undernourished people,” said Andy McDonald, a cropping systems agronomist at CIMMYT. “But unsustainable farming practices threaten the region’s productivity and are worsening global climate change.”

The burning of paddy straw is one example, according to expert studies. Besides triggering costly respiratory ailments in humans and animals in farm regions and urban centers like Delhi, burning rice residues depletes soil nutrients, with estimated yearly losses in Punjab alone of 3.9 million tons of organic carbon, 59,000 tons of nitrogen, 20,000 tons of phosphorus and 34,000 tons of potassium, according to M.L. Jat, a senior agronomist at CIMMYT, who leads CIMMYT’s contributions to “climate-smart” villages in South Asia, as part of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).

Zero tillage: A lot to like

Traditional tillage for sowing wheat in northern India involves removing or burning rice straw and driving tractor-drawn implements back and forth over fields to rebuild a soil bed from the rice paddy, a costly and protracted process.

Zero tillage cuts farmers’ costs and provides better yields. By eliminating plowing, farmers can sow wheat up to two weeks earlier. This allows the crop to fill grain before India’s withering pre-Monsoon heat arrives — an advantage that is lost under conventional practices.

A 2016 study in Bihar state showed that farmers’ annual income increased by an average 6 percent when they used zero tillage to sow wheat, due both to better yields and savings in diesel fuel through reduced tractor use.

Zero tillage also diminishes farmers’ risk from erratic precipitation, according to Jat. “A new study in Haryana has shown that in wet years when conventionally-sown wheat fields are waterlogged, zero-tilled crops can produce 16 percent more grain.”

Environmental and climate change benefits include 93 kilograms less greenhouse gas emissions per hectare. “In the long run, retaining crop residues builds up soil organic matter and thereby reduces farming’s carbon footprint,” Jat explained.

Zero-tilled wheat also requires 20 to 35 percent less irrigation water, slowing depletion of the region’s rapidly-dwindling underground water reserves and putting money in farmers’ pockets by reducing their need to pump.

“It’s impressive that a single practice provides such a broad set of benefits,” said McDonald, who leads CIMMYT’s Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA).

Specialized seed planters sell slowly

Farmer awareness is growing, but putting aside the plow is not an easy proposition for some. In particular, zero tillage requires use of a special, tractor-mounted implement which, in a single pass, chops rice residues, opens a rut in the soil, and precisely deposits and covers the seed.

Development of this special seeder was first funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) and led by Punjab Agricultural University, with contributions from CIMMYT and other organizations. The latest version, the Turbo Happy Seeder, costs $1,900 — an investment that many farmers still struggle to make.

“As an alternative, we’ve been saying that not all farmers need to own a seeder,” Jat observed. “Many can simply hire local service providers who have purchased the seeder and will sow on contract.” In Bihar and the neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh, the number of zero-tillage service providers rose from only 17 in 2012 to more than 1,900 in 2015, according to Jat.

Given New Delhi’s smog troubles, Haryana and Punjab policymakers are adding support to avoid burning rice straw. “The government of Haryana has taken a policy decision to aggressively promote the seeder for zero tillage and residue management and to provide 1,900 seeders on subsidy this year,” said Suresh Gehlawat, assistant director of agriculture for that state, in a recent statement.

On the horizon: Zero tillage for rice

As part of these efforts, CIMMYT scientists and partners are testing and promoting with farmers a suite of resource-conserving practices. These include precision land levelling, which saves water and improves productivity, as well as directly sowing rice into untilled, non-flooded plots.

“The practice of direct-seeded rice requires less labor, raising farmers’ profits by as much as $130 per hectare over paddy-grown rice,” said Jat. “Moreover, growing rice in non-flooded fields uses 25 percent less water and reduces the emission of methane, a greenhouse gas 200 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, by 20 kilograms per hectare.”

EL BATAN, Mexico (CIMMYT) — Almost half the world’s wheat land is sown to varieties that come directly or indirectly from research by a longstanding, global network of crop scientists, according to a new report by CIMMYT.

Yearly economic benefits of that research ranged from $2.2 to 3.1 billion (in 2010 dollars), and resulted from annual funding of just $30 million, a benefit-cost ratio as high as 103:1, the study shows.

Published to coincide with CIMMYT’s 50^th anniversary, the new study tabulates and analyzes the pedigrees of 4,604 wheat varieties released worldwide during 1994-2014, based on survey responses from public and private breeding programs in 66 countries.

Fully 63 percent of the varieties featured genetic contributions from the breeding research of CIMMYT or of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), both members of CGIAR, a publicly-funded agricultural-research-for-development consortium.

In 2014, those varieties — all developed through conventional cross-breeding and selection — accounted for 106 million of the approximately 220 million hectares of wheat harvested worldwide, according to Michael Baum, Director of ICARDA’s Biodiversity and Integrated Gene Management Program and Morocco Platform.

“The fourth in a series of wheat impact assessments first published in 1993, the latest report highlights impressive CGIAR contributions in all wheat-growing regions,” Baum said. “In South Asia, for example, which is home to more than 300 million undernourished people and whose inhabitants consume over 100 million tons of wheat a year, 92 percent of the varieties carried CGIAR ancestry.”

FREE SEED, FUNDING CRUCIAL

CIMMYT and ICARDA depend on donor assistance and national partnerships to achieve meaningful farm-level impacts, but national co-investments do not figure in the current study, according to Hans Braun, director of CIMMYT’s global wheat program. “In 2014 alone, CIMMYT distributed free of charge more than 12 tons of seed of experimental lines for testing and other research by 346 partners in public and private breeding programs of 79 countries,” Braun said. “The partners return performance data to us, but can freely use lines they choose for their own breeding and varietal development efforts.”

“Started in the 1950s by the late Norman Borlaug, this global wheat improvement pipeline has been the main source of new genetic variation for wheat yield increases, adaptation to climate change, and resistance to crop pests and diseases,” Braun added. “The latest impact study attests to its continued worth, but reliable and consistent funding is critical, if global wheat breeding is to satisfy rising demand for the crop in developing countries.”

Led by Borlaug, who won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his contributions and worked at CIMMYT until 1979, wheat breeding advances during the 1960s-70s helped to spark the Green Revolution from which the 15-member CGIAR arose and to keep food prices at historically low levels for decades.

But by 2050 the current global population of 7.3 billion is projected to grow 33 percent to 9.7 billion, according to the United Nations. Demand for food, driven by population, urbanization, and increasing global wealth, will rise more than 60 percent, according to a recent report from the Taskforce on Extreme Weather and Global Food System Resilience.

Experts say that wheat farmers must meet this rising demand from the same or less land area, while confronting more extreme and erratic rainfall and temperatures and using inputs like water and fertilizer much more effectively.

Developing countries received the greatest benefit from CGIAR contributions, particularly in spring bread and spring durum wheat areas, an outcome that aligns with CGIAR’s mandate to help resource-poor farmers and alleviate poverty and malnutrition. Still, adoption of CGIAR-related cultivars was not limited to developing countries and the study highlights significant spill-overs:

• In Canada, three-quarters of the wheat area was sown to CGIAR-related cultivars.
• In the U.S., nearly 60 percent of the wheat area was sown to CGIAR-related varieties.
• In Western Australia, CGIAR-related varieties were used on more than 90 percent of the wheat area.

To view or download a copy of the study, click on the title below:

Lantican, M.A., H.J. Braun, T.S. Payne, R.P. Singh, K. Sonder, M. Baum, M. van Ginkel, and O. Erenstein. 2016. Impacts of International Wheat Improvement Research, 1994-2014. Mexico, D.F.: CIMMYT.

The good news: by 2050, world population growth will likely fall to half or less the rate of 1.7% per year witnessed over the last half of the 20th century, offering a glimmer of hope for humanity to feed itself sustainably. More troubling though is that agricultural productivity growth is also slowing in many parts of the world, often because of declining investments in farm productivity-oriented research and political indifference. Which competing trend will win out in the end?

Attempting to answer this critical question and shed light on the causes, Philip G. Pardey, Professor of Science and Technology Policy, University of Minnesota, spoke to a global gathering of CIMMYT scientists in Mexico on 15 June. His presentation gave evidence and conclusions from recently published research¹ to develop and apply the new “International Agricultural Prospects” model that projects global agricultural consumption and production to 2050.

Looking at U.S. trends over the 20th Century, Pardey said that agricultural productivity grew quickly until 1990 but the pace of growth slowed afterwards by more than half. “Data from 1910 show a curvilinear trend featuring a productivity surge in the 1950s-70s,” he explained. “This U.S. surge might be illustrative of a more general one-time phenomenon in many agricultural economies around the world. This includes widespread uptake of agricultural chemicals, improved seeds, fertilizer and other modern inputs, and a massive movement of labor out of the sector.” The implication, he said, was a need to double down on sustainable agricultural productivity growth including giving increased attention to research that maintains past productivity gains.

Other conclusions from Pardey included:

• Think long-term: it takes decades to go from an idea to a commercialized farm technology.
• The basic political economy is driving investments away from farm productivity.
• Population and demographics are major determinants of the consumption of agricultural output.
• Additional demand for biofuels may not have as dramatic an effect on food futures as some speculate.
• Available agricultural land appears more than sufficient for the projected growth in food production.

Regarding consumption, the model factored in consumption of biofuels, human food and animal feed, while considering changes in population growth, per capita income, and demographics — most notably the aging of the planet’s population. “We expect worldwide average per capita incomes in 2050 to be at the levels of more prosperous countries in 2000, but with a big spread among regions of the world,” said Pardey. “There will be encouraging reductions in people below the poverty line, but major clusters of the poor will persist in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.” He also observed that increased life expectancies and numbers of the elderly in countries like China would reduce the demand for calories and change the structure of diets.

The driving factors used to forecast production included the pace of crop yield growth in different regions around the world, the location and availability of agricultural land, and its agro-ecological suitability for growing specific crops. “In the U.S., the ‘average’ maize plant has moved 279 kilometers north and 342 kilometers west since 1910,” he explained. “From 16 to 21 percent of the growth in U.S. maize output is attributable to this movement.”

^[1] See A Bounds Analysis of World Food Futures: Global Agriculture Through to 2050 and The International Agricultural Prospects Model: Assessing Consumption and Production Futures Through 2050 (version 2.1).

Lack of good seed of appropriate varieties is holding back harvests of smallholder wheat farmers in rugged, rain-fed areas of Punjab, Pakistan, said a group of farmers to some 50 representatives of seed companies, input dealers, and research, extension and development organizations, at a workshop in Chakwal, Punjab, on 18 September 2014.

“Ninety-five percent of farmers in Pothwar, a semi-arid region of bare and broken terrain, use farm-saved seed of obsolete varieties, invariably with limited use of modern agricultural technologies and inputs, resulting in poor crop establishment and low yields,” said Krishna Dev Joshi, CIMMYT wheat improvement specialist based in Pakistan. “Their yields average only 0.6 tons per hectare, whereas progressive farmers in irrigated areas get ten times that much.”

Joshi said only three varieties cover 83 percent of the region’s wheat area and the same cultivars have been used for an average of 24 years. “One of these, C591, is a variety that was recommended in 1934 and is still grown on about 14 percent of the region’s nearly 0.6 million hectares of wheat area.”

According to Akhlaq Hussain, ex-Director General, Pakistan Department of Federal Seed Certification and Registration, one problem is that, despite their low yields, the older varieties have many traits that the farmers like. For example, they give stable yields under low inputs and harsh growing conditions and provide the preferred flavor and long-lasting good texture in chapattis.

Muhammad Tariq, Director of the Barani Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), Chakwal, Punjab, said there are few producers or suppliers of suitable, quality seed, fertilizer or other farm inputs for such marginal areas. They may be considered unattractive markets, but more than 70 percent of Pakistani wheat farmers are smallholders, cultivating between one and five hectares of land, according to Tariq.

Such farmers harvest on average only 1.5 tons per hectare and urgently need better seed and technology to raise their yields, said Joshi. “Farmers at the workshop complained they could not get access to high-yielding varieties of their choice,” he explained. “They also criticized the long time — typically three years — required to obtain seed of new varieties, once the varieties are officially released.”

Given this need and the lack of legitimate suppliers, fraudulent seed dealers and middlemen often market inferior or false products. “Last year I bought a bag of seed labelled ‘Galaxy,’ a new, high-yielding variety,” said Haji Muhammad Aslam Ochallee, a farmer from Khushab District, “but the seed inside was of an entirely different variety.”

Some seed dealers may mix seed or sell grain in bags labelled ‘certified seed’ at low prices to lure smallholders, and big landlords may sell cheap seed illegally to neighbors, said Qaiser Rasheed, Managing Director of the company Robert Cotton Association. “All these practices cheat farmers, distort markets and erode farmers’ trust in the formal seed sector,” Rasheed observed.

Pothwar’s problems reflect Pakistan’s overall food security challenge, according to Joshi. “A 2014 bulletin by the World Food Program shows that more than 27 million people in Pakistan are highly-to-severely food insecure,” he said. “The big concern is that most smallholders and vulnerable people live in districts that will need special attention to improve food security.”

Activating the Wheat Seed Value Chain

As a part of the Agricultural Innovation Program (AIP) for Pakistan, a project funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), CIMMYT is working with the Pakistan Agricultural Research Council (PARC), BARI in Punjab, seed companies and farmers to close gaps in the wheat seed value chain for rain-fed Punjab.

Workshop participants cited the need for better communication and coordination of research and extension agencies with commercial input suppliers sector and, especially, better marketing of new wheat varieties to farmers. “If stakeholders don’t integrate and coordinate, small-scale farmers will remain deprived of modern technologies and innovations, such as wheat varieties that resist new and virulent disease strains,” said Joshi.

“If stakeholders don’t integrate and coordinate, small-scale farmers will remain deprived of modern technologies and innovations, such as wheat varieties that resist new and virulent disease strains”

– Krishna Dev Joshi

CIMMYT Wheat Improvement Specialist

Farmers recommended establishing village committees to choose and access seed of new varieties and help foster truth in labeling. They particularly called for strict punishment for those selling fake seed.

For their part, seed companies said the lack of reliable irrigation or storage facilities hinders seed production in Pothwar. “Because of this, seed must be transported over long distances, raising costs, which in turn discourages buyers and cuts profits,” said one company representative.

The workshop forged an agreement to allow private seed companies to produce pre-basic and basic seed, supervised by concerned breeders and with support from Federal Seed Certification and Registration Department, to speed the marketing of new varieties. One result was that Robert Cotton Association has received pre-basic and basic seeds of two wheat varieties, Chakwal50 and Dharabi11, originally developed and released by BARI, which will provide technical backstopping.

Other action points agreed on at the workshop included the following:

• On-farm trials and demonstrations that allow farmers to learn about and choose from new, high-yielding wheat varieties. To address this, AIP-wheat has already launched participatory varietal selection trials in which farmers and researchers jointly evaluate 14 new, high-yielding, disease resistant wheat varieties of diverse genetic backgrounds on the farms of 65 smallholders across Pothwar. In addition, to help farmers assess and improve crop management practices, the project is conducting 20 on-farm, participatory experiments on fertilizer use and 107 trials on pre-soaking seed, a practice that improves germination and crop establishment.
• Community-based seed production linked with private companies and supported by proper equipment and training in quality seed production. Achievements to date include seed of 9 new varieties being multiplied directly with 52 Pothwar farmers on more than 42 hectares.