Sorghum field in Kiboko, Kenya. (Photo: E Manyasa/ICRISAT)
As part of the One CGIAR reform, the Global Science Group on Genetic Innovation will implement a crop breeding and seed systems project for key crops including groundnut, sorghum and millet, across western and eastern African countries.
The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), a leader in innovative partnerships, breeding and agronomic science for sustainable agri-food systems, will lead the project.
The Accelerated Varietal Improvement and Seed Delivery of Legumes and Cereals in Africa (AVISA) project aims to improve the health and livelihoods of millions by increasing the productivity, profitability, resilience and marketability of nutritious grain, legumes and cereal crops. The project focuses on strengthening networks to modernize crop breeding by CGIAR and national program partners, and public-private partnerships to strengthen seed systems. The project currently works in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, Uganda and Tanzania.
“Sorghum, groundnut and millets are essential staples of nutritious diets for millions of farmers and consumers and are crucial for climate-change-resilient farming systems,” explained CIMMYT Deputy Director General and Head of Genetic Resources, Kevin Pixley. “The oversight of this project by CGIAR’s Genetic Innovation Science Group will ensure continued support for the improvement of these crops in partnership with the national agricultural research and extension systems (NARES) that work with and for farmers,” he said.
“CIMMYT is delighted to lead this project on behalf of the Genetic Innovations Science Group and CGIAR,” confirms CIMMYT Director General, Bram Govaerts.
“We look forward to contributing to co-design and co-implement with partners and stakeholders the next generation of programs that leverage and build the strengths of NARES, CGIAR and others along with the research to farmers and consumers continuum to improve nutrition, livelihoods, and resilience to climate change through these crops and their cropping systems.”
A worker uses a machine to seal a bag of maize seed at the Sementes Nzara Yapera Lda warehouse in Catandika, Mozambique. Photo: CIMMYT/Kipenz Films.
A newly published special issue in the journal Outlook on Agriculture features views and experiences on seed systems performance in Sub-Saharan Africa and options to drive faster uptake of new crop varieties. The contributions reflect the breadth of perspectives and expertise within CGIAR and beyond and make the case for the need for more demand-oriented variety development and seed delivery.
A seed system refers to the various actors, processes, and relationships that allow for the production, conservation, exchange and use of propagation materials for crops, trees, forages, livestock, and fish. For the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), seed systems involve private seed companies, retailers, and government research agencies, among others, that are involved in the design, testing, production and distribution of high-yielding, climate-resilient, and pest- and disease-resistant maize hybrids.
“A well-functioning seed system is critical for ensuring that farmers have reliable access to the quality seeds that they want. It forms the critical link between breeders and the small-scale farmers responsible for much of the food production in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and South Asia,” said CIMMYT Senior Economist Jason Donovan, who co-authored the introductory article.
“The papers in this collection raise important issues which up to now have not received enough attention, to include the strategies, capacities and incentives of the private sector to invest in the distribution of new varieties. The topics discussed have implications for the One CGIAR in its ongoing efforts to develop a coherent and coordinated seed system research program that supports accelerated varietal uptake and turnover through effective seed delivery,” he added.
CIMMYT researchers contributed two papers, one which looks at the role of different types of seed producers and traders in shaping seed systems performance and another which proposes new directions for research on gender and formal maize seed systems. The special edition grew out of the CGIAR Community of Excellence for Seed Systems Development where CIMMYT led the discussion on seed value chains and private sector linkages.
One consensus among the authors is that a wider range of partnerships will be required to reenforce the potential of seed systems to delivery more new varieties to small-scale farmers in less time.
Several recent studies document the long-term health and economic benefits from the “Green Revolution” — the widespread adoption of high-yielding staple crop varieties during the last half of the 20th century — and argue for continued investment in the development and use of such varieties.
“Our estimates provide compelling evidence that the health benefits of broad-based increases in agricultural productivity should not be overlooked,” the authors state. “From a policy perspective, government subsidies for inputs leading to a green revolution as well as investments in extension and R&D programs seem to be important.”
Norman Borlaug (fourth from right) shows a plot of Sonora-64 wheat — one of the semi-dwarf, high-yield, disease-resistant varieties that was key to the Green Revolution — to a group of young international trainees at CIMMYT’s experimental station in Ciudad Obregon, Sonora state, Mexico. (Photo: CIMMYT)
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of the global food system and the need to transform it, increasing its environmental and economic resilience to withstand future threats, and underpinning healthier diets. The studies suggest that improved versions of cereal crops such as rice, wheat, and maize can play a key role.
“Our work speaks to the importance of supporting innovation and technology adoption in agriculture as a means of fostering economic development, improved health, and poverty reduction, said author Jan von der Goltz. “It also suggests that it is reasonable to view with some alarm the steady decline in funding for cereal crop improvement over the last few decades in sub-Saharan Africa, the continent with least diffusion of modern varieties.”
Likewise, a study co-authored by Prashant Bharadwaj of the University of California, San Diego, concluded that farmer adoption of high-yielding crop varieties (HYVs) in India reduced infant mortality dramatically across the country. Between 1960 and 2000, infant deaths dropped from 163.8 to 66.6 per 1,000 live births, and this occurred during the decades of India’s wheat productivity leap from 0.86 to 2.79 tons per hectare, as a result of HYV adoption and improved farming practices.
“What both of these papers do is to carefully establish a causal estimate of how HYVs affect infant mortality, by only comparing children born in the same location at different points in time, when HYV use was different, and by checking that mortality before arrival of HYVs was trending similarly in places that would receive different amount of HYVs,” Bharadwaj said.
“In the absence of a randomized control trial, these econometric techniques produce the best causal estimate of a phenomenon as important as the spread of HYVs during and after the Green Revolution,” he added. These thoughts were echoed by University of California San Diego professor Gordon McCord, a co-author of the global study.
Recent studies indicate that the Green Revolution also had long-term economic impacts, which also affected health outcomes.
In a 2021 update to the 2018 paper “Two Blades of Grass: The Impact of the Green Revolution,” Douglas Gollin, Professor of Development Economics at Oxford University and co-authors found that, in 90 countries where high-yielding varieties were adopted between 1965 and 2010, food crop yields increased by 44% and that, had this adoption not occurred, GDP per capita in the developing world could be half of what it is today.
Even a 10-year delay of the Green Revolution would, in 2010, have cost 17% of GDP per capita in the developing world, with a cumulative GDP loss of $83 trillion, equivalent to one year of current global GDP.
These GDP and health impacts were boosted by a related reduction in population growth. By observing causal inference at country, regional and developing world levels, and using a novel long-term impact assessment method, the study authors detected a trend: as living standards improved for rural families, they generally wanted to invest more in their children and have fewer.
“Our estimates suggest that the world would have contained more than 200 million additional people in 2010, if the onset of the Green Revolution had been delayed for ten years,” Gollin and his co-authors stated. This lower population growth seems to have increased the relative size of the working age population, which furthered GDP growth.
Ethiopian farmers give feedback to CGIAR researchers about durum wheat varieties. (Photo: C.Fadda/Bioversity International) (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
A long-term investment in system transformation
It takes time from the point of an intervention to when broad health impacts can be observed in the population, the authors note. For example, although the development of modern high-yielding varieties began in the 1950s and 60s, the rate of adoption did not speed up until the 1980s, 1990s, and even into the 2000s, with evidence from sub-Saharan Africa showing that variety adoption has increased by as much in the 2000s as in the four preceding decades.
In addition, any nutrition and food security strategy which aims to reach the second Sustainable Development Goal of feeding 9 billion by 2050 must incorporate wider system transformation solutions, such as zero-emissions agriculture, affordable, diverse diets and increased land conservation.
As Gollin explained, “The Green Revolution taught us that we need to approach productivity increases, especially in staple crop yields, differently. The challenge now is more complex: we need to get the same productivity increases, with fewer inputs and resources, more environmental awareness, and in larger quantities for more people.”
In part, this means increasing productivity on existing agricultural land with positive environmental and social impacts, according to Bram Govaerts, director general of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).
“Breeding and sharing more productive, hardy crop varieties is as important as ever,” Govaerts said, “but also engaging farmers — in our case, smallholders — in shared research and innovation efforts to bridge yield gaps, build climate-resilient farming systems, and open access to better nutrition and market opportunities.”
Cover photo: Children eat lunch at a mobile crèche outside Delhi, India. (Photo: Atul Loke/ODI) (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Dave Hodson, International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) senior scientist delivered a large-scale overview of the current global wheat rust situation and the state of disease surveillance systems. He underscored the importance of comprehensive early warning systems and promising new detection tools that help to raise awareness and improve control. A new assessment of the early warning system for rust In Ethiopia showed a real impact on farmers’ interest, awareness, and farming practices to control the disease, as well as high-level policy changes.
Alison Bentley, CIMMYT Global Wheat Program director, described cutting-edge tools and methods by CIMMYT and, in particular, the Accelerating Genetic Gains in Maize and Wheat for Improved Livelihoods (AGG) project to increase wheat productivity in the face of changing climates. In addition to the new approaches on the supply side, she argued, we also need increased research on the demand side to better understand why farmers will choose a new variety, the role of markets and gender, and how we can scale up these systems. Bentley emphasized the criticality of supporting public and private sector efforts to get more improved germplasm into farmers’ fields in less time.
Philomin Juliana, CIMMYT Global Wheat Program associate scientist highlighted the pivotal role that data plays in breeding decisions and line advancements in CIMMYT’s wheat breeding program. This has been facilitated by improvements in how data sets, like genomic estimated breeding values (GEBVs), are shared with breeders. “CIMMYT has adopted a holistic, data-driven selection approach” that leverages phenotypic data, genomic-estimated breeding values (GEBVs) and selection indices, Juliana explained.
Drone view of CIMMYT’s experimental station in Toluca, State of Mexico, Mexico. A valley located at 2,630 meters above sea level with a cool and humid climate is the ideal location for selecting wheat materials resistant to foliar diseases, such as wheat rusts. Most of the trials done here are for wheat and triticale, but also include a couple maize plots. (Photo: Alfonso Cortés/CIMMYT)
The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) will rename one of its most historic and successful wheat experimental stations in honor of Sanjaya Rajaram, a former Wheat Program director, distinguished scientist and World Food Prize laureate.
Rajaram, one of the most successful and influential wheat breeders ever, passed away in Mexico on February 17, 2021. The wheat experimental station managed by CIMMYT in Toluca, Mexico, will be renamed “Centro Experimental Sanjaya Rajaram” in his honor.
Rajaram joined CIMMYT in 1969, working alongside Nobel Prize Laureate and scientist Norman Borlaug in Mexico. Recognizing his talent and initiative, Borlaug appointed Rajaram as head of CIMMYT’s wheat breeding program when he was 29 years old. His career accomplishments include overseeing the development of more than 480 high-yielding, disease-resistant wheat varieties, which are sown today on 58 million hectares in 51 countries.
Norman Borlaug (right) in the field with Sanjaya Rajaram, his successor as head of CIMMYT’s wheat program. (Photo: Gene Hettel/CIMMYT)
The wheat experimental station is located on the outskirts of Mexico’s fifth largest city, Toluca, about 60 kilometers southwest of Mexico City. It is a key testing location in the shuttle breeding process that Borlaug developed in the 1960s in his quest for high-yielding wheat to avert global famine — a breeding process that successfully continues to this day. It is also the site where Borlaug famously received news of his 1970 Nobel Peace Prize win.
“Dr. Rajaram was a world-renowned wheat breeder and scientist and a true hunger fighter. In 2014, he was recognized with one of the highest honors in agriculture, the World Food Prize, in acknowledgement for improving the lives of hundreds of millions of people through his work on high-yielding and disease-resistant wheat varieties grown on more than 58 million hectares throughout the world,” said CIMMYT Director General Martin Kropff. “He was an inspiring and cherished presence at CIMMYT for 40 years. His loss is felt by all of us and I am delighted to be able to honor him this way.”
“It is only fitting that a wheat experimental station crucial to Borlaug’s pioneering work be named for Dr. Rajaram, who followed in his footsteps,” said CIMMYT Chief Operating Officer, Deputy Director General for Research, and Integrated Development Program Director Bram Govaerts.
A virtual event to remember Rajaram and officially dedicate the Toluca station in his honor is tentatively planned for May.
Alinda Sarah shows a maize cob due for harvest on the farm she owns with her husband in Masindi, mid-western Uganda. (Photo: Joshua Masinde/CIMMYT)
The ultimate challenge for crop breeders is to increase genetic gain of a crop: literally, to increase the crop’s yield on farmers’ fields. Wheat and maize breeders from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and partner institutions are working to achieve this in record time, developing new varieties tailored for farmers’ needs that are also pest- and disease-resistant, climate-resilient, and nutritious.
This work is part of the Accelerating Genetic Gain in Maize and Wheat for Improved Livelihoods (AGG) project. Among other methods, breeders are using state-of-the-art novel tools such as genomic selection to achieve this ambitious goal.
In genomic selection, breeders use information about a plant’s genetic makeup along with data on its visible and measurable traits, known as phenotypic data, to “train” a model to predict how a cross will turn out — information known as “genomic estimated breeding values (GEBV)” — without having to plant seeds, wait for them to grow, and physically measure their traits. In this way, they save time and costs by reducing the number of selection cycles.
However, research is still ongoing about the best way to use genomic selection that results in the most accurate predictions and ultimately reduces selection cycle time. A recent publication by CIMMYT scientist Sikiru Atanda and colleagues has identified an optimal genomic selection strategy that maximizes the efficiency of this novel technology. Although this research studied CIMMYT’s maize breeding programs, AGG scientists working on wheat genetic gain and zinc nutritional content see cross-crop impacts.
Shortening a lengthy process
In the typical breeding stages, breeders evaluate parental lines to create new crosses, and advance these lines through preliminary and elite yield trials. In the process, thousands of lines are sown, grown and analyzed, requiring considerable resources. In the traditional CIMMYT maize breeding scheme, for example, breeders conduct five stages of testing to identify parental lines for the next breeding cycle and develop high yielding hybrids that meet farmers’ needs.
In the current scheme using genomic selection, breeders phenotype 50% of a bi-parental population to predict the GEBVs of the remaining un-tested 50%. Though this reduces the cost of phenotyping, Atanda and his co-authors suggest it is not optimal because the breeder has to wait three to four months for the plant to grow before collecting the phenotypic data needed to calibrate the predictive model for the un-tested 50%.
Atanda and his colleagues’ findings specify how to calibrate a model based on existing historical phenotypic and genotypic data. They also offer a method for creating “experimental” sets to generate phenotypic information when the models don’t work due to low genetic connectedness between the new population and historical data.
This presents a way forward for breeders to accelerate the early yield testing stage based on genomic information, reduce the breeding cycle time and budget, and ultimately increase genetic gain.
Regional maize breeding coordinator for Africa Yoseph Beyene explained the leap forward this approach represents for CIMMYT’s maize breeding in Africa.
“For the last 5 years, CIMMYT’s African maize breeding program has applied genomic selection using the ‘test-half-and-predict-half’ strategy,” he said. “This has already reduced operational costs by 32% compared to the traditional phenotypic selection.”
“The prediction approach shown in this paper — using historical data alone to predict untested lines that go directly to stage-two trials — could reduce the breeding cycle by a year and save the cost of testcross formation and multi-location evaluation of stage-one testing. This research contributes to our efforts in the AGG project to mainstream genomic selection in all the product profiles.”
Effective for maize and wheat
Atanda, who now works on the use of novel breeding methods to enhance grain zinc content in CIMMYT’s wheat breeding program, believes these findings apply to wheat breeding as well.
“The implications of the research in maize are the same in wheat: accelerating early testing stage and reducing the breeding budget, which ultimately results in increasing genetic gain,” he said.
CIMMYT Global Wheat Program director Alison Bentley is optimistic about the crossover potential. “It is fantastic to welcome Atanda to the global wheat program, bringing skills in the use of quantitative genetic approaches,” she said. “The use of new breeding methods such as genomic selection is part of a portfolio of approaches we are using to accelerate breeding.”
CIMMYT’s wheat breeding relies heavily on a time-tested and validated method using managed environments to test lines for a range of growing environments — from drought to full irrigation, heat tolerance and more — in CIMMYT’s wheat experimental station in Ciudad Obregón, in Mexico’s state of Sonora.
According to CIMMYT senior scientist and wheat breeder Velu Govindan, using the approaches tested by Sikiru can make this even more efficient. As a specialist in biofortification — using traditional breeding techniques to develop crops with high levels of micronutrients — Govindan is taking the lead mainstreaming high zinc into all CIMMYT improved wheat varieties.
“This process could help us identify best lines to share with partners one year earlier — and it can be done for zinc content as easily as for grain yield.”
If this study seems like an excellent fit for the AGG project’s joint focus on accelerating genetic gain for both maize and wheat, that is no accident.
“The goal of the AGG project was the focus of my research,” Atanda said. “My study has shown that this goal is doable and achievable.”
Wheat infected with the blast fungus in Meherpur, Bangladesh, in 2019. (Photo: PLOS Biology)
As scientists study and learn more about the complicated genetic makeup of the wheat genome, one chromosomal segment has stood out, particularly in efforts to breed high-yielding wheat varieties resistant to devastating and quickly spreading wheat diseases.
Known as the 2NvS translocation, this segment on the wheat genome has been associated with grain yield, tolerance to wheat stems bending over or lodging, and multiple-disease resistance.
Now, thanks to a new multi-institution study led by wheat scientist Liangliang Gao of Kansas State University, we have a clearer picture of the yield advantage and disease resistance conferred by this chromosomal segment for wheat farmers — and more opportunities to capitalize on these benefits for future breeding efforts.
The Aegilops ventricosa 2NvS segment in bread wheat: cytology, genomics and breeding, published in Theoretical and Applied Genetics, summarizes the collaborative effort by scientists from several scientific institutions — including International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) head of global wheat improvement Ravi Singh and wheat scientist Philomin Juliana — to conduct the first complete cytological characterization of the 2NvS translocation.
A rich background
The 2NvS translocation segment has been very valuable in disease-resistance wheat breeding since the early 1990s. Originally introduced into wheat cultivar VPM1 by the French cytogeneticist Gerard Doussinault in 1983 by crossing with a wild wheat relative called Aegilops ventricosa, the segment has been conferring resistance to diseases like eye spot (Pch1 gene), leaf rust (Lr37 gene), stem rust (Sr38 gene), stripe rust (Yr17 gene), cereal cyst (Cre5 gene), root knot (Rkn3 gene) and wheat blast.
The high-yielding blast-resistant CIMMYT-derived varieties BARI Gom 33 and WMRI#3 (equivalent to Borlaug100),released in Bangladesh to combat a devastating outbreak of wheat blast in the region, carry the 2NvS translocation segment for blast resistance.
Earlier research by Juliana and others found that the proportion of lines with the 2NvS translocation had increased by 113.8% over seven years in CIMMYT’s international bread wheat screening nurseries: from 44% in 2012 to 94.1% in 2019. It had also increased by 524.3% in the semi-arid wheat screening nurseries: from 15% in 2012 to 93.7% in 2019. This study validates these findings, further demonstrating an increasing frequency of the 2NvS translocation in spring and winter wheat breeding programs over the past two decades.
New discoveries
The authors of this study completed a novel assembly and functional annotation of the genes in the 2NvS translocation using the winter bread wheat cultivar Jagger. They validated it using the spring wheat cultivar CDC Stanley and estimated the actual size of the segment to be approximately 33 mega base pairs.
Their findings substantiate that the 2NvS region is rich in disease resistance genes, with more than 10% of the 535 high-confidence genes annotated in this region belonging to the nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat (NLR) gene families known to be associated with disease resistance. This was a higher number of NLRs compared to the wheat segment of the Chinese Spring reference genome that was replaced by this segment, adding further evidence to its multiple-disease resistant nature.
In addition to being an invaluable region for disease resistance, the study makes a strong case that the 2NvS region also confers a yield advantage. The authors performed yield association analyses using yield data on lines from the Kansas State University wheat breeding program, the USDA Regional Performance Nursery —comprising lines from central US winter wheat breeding programs — and the CIMMYT spring bread wheat breeding program, and found a strong association between the presence of the segment and higher yield.
Global benefits
The yield and disease resistance associations of the 2NvS genetic segment have been helping farmers for years, as seen in the high proportion of the segment present in the improved wheat germplasm distributed globally through CIMMYT’s nurseries.
“The high frequency of the valuable 2NvS translocation in CIMMYT’s internationally distributed germplasm demonstrates well how CIMMYT has served as a key disseminator of lines with this translocation globally that would have likely contributed to a large impact on global wheat production,” said study co-author Juliana.
Through CIMMYT’s distribution efforts, it is likely that national breeding programs have also effectively used this translocation, in addition to releasing many 2NvS-carrying varieties selected directly from CIMMYT distributed nurseries.
With this study, we now know more about why the segment is so ubiquitous and have more tools at our disposal to use it more deliberately to raise yield and combat disease for wheat farmers into the future.
The President of India, Ram Nath Kovind (left) and the Minister of External Affairs, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar (right) announce the award to Ravi Singh. (Photo: Ministry of External Affairs, India)
Ravi Singh, Distinguished Scientist and Head of Global Wheat Improvement at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), has received the highest honor conferred by the Government of India to non-resident Indians.
The Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Award recognizes outstanding achievements by non-resident Indians, persons of Indian origin, or organizations or institutions run by them either in India or abroad. Awardees are selected for their support to India’s causes and concerns by a committee led by the Vice President and the Minister of External Affairs of India. The awardees, according to the awards website, “represent the vibrant excellence achieved by our diaspora in various fields.” The online award announcement ceremony took place on January 9, 2021, with India’s President Ram Nath Kovind as a chief guest.
Ravi Singh, whose career at CIMMYT spans 37 years, was recognized for his invaluable contributions to wheat research and the development and training of scientists that have increased food production and nutritional security in Mexico, India and numerous other countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
“The award recognizes and values many years of wheat breeding at CIMMYT, where I had the opportunity, privilege and satisfaction to have contributed and made impacts through our invaluable partners in India and many other countries,” Singh said. “By continuously providing superior varieties, we increased wheat production and incomes of millions of smallholder farming families.”
Singh’s nomination cited his contribution to the development, release and cultivation by national partners worldwide of over 550 wheat varieties over the past three decades. These national partners include the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and its affiliated institutions in India. These varieties, sown annually on over 40 million hectares by as many farmers, add over $1 billion annually to farmers’ incomes through increased productivity and built-in disease resistance, thus reducing chemical dependence to a negligible level.
Ravi Singh (left, in striped shirt) shows students how to score the seed of freshly-harvested wheat lines at CIMMYT’s experimental station near Ciudad Obregón, Mexico, during the international Wheat Improvement Course in 2007. (Photo: CIMMYT)
“Great teamwork leads to breakthroughs — and is the only way to achieve a common goal. Dr. Ravi Singh’s work alleviating hunger is a great service to mankind,” said Gyanendra Pratap Singh, director of the ICAR Indian Institute of Wheat and Barley Research (ICAR-IIWBR). “We are proud to have him on our team.”
“This award recognizes Dr. Ravi Singh’s important contribution to CIMMYT wheat breeding, delivering major impacts to wheat production and smallholder livelihoods in India, and around the world,” said Alison Bentley, director of CIMMYT’s Global Wheat Program.
Over his career, Singh has nourished and further expanded an already strong partnership between CIMMYT, ICAR and various agricultural universities in India by developing and sharing each year new, diverse wheat varieties possessing increased grain and straw yields, resistance to diseases such as rusts, spot blotch and blast, climate resilience, and processing and nutritional quality.
Over the past decade, Singh’s team developed about half of the wheat varieties released in India through the ICAR network. These include the country’s first high-yielding biofortified varieties, WB-2 and PBW1-Zn, released in 2017 to benefit India’s zinc-deficient population.
Millions of farmers in India continue to grow CIMMYT wheat varieties or their derivatives developed by Indian institutions, to ensure safe and abundant harvests and better nutrition.
Ravi Singh’s numerous recognitions include membership as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Phytopathological Society (APS), the Crop Science Society of America (CSSA), the American Society of Agronomy (ASA) and India’s National Academy of Agricultural Science (NAAS). His awards include the Outstanding CGIAR Scientist Award, the CSSA Crop Science Research Award, the University of Minnesota E.C. Stakman Award, and the China State Council’s Friendship Award, among others. He has been included among the top 1% of highly cited researchers according to Clarivate Analytics-Web of Science every year since 2017. Singh also serves as Adjunct Professor at Cornell University and Kansas State University.
Wheat fields at Toluca station, Mexico. (Photo: Fernando Delgado/CIMMYT)
On December 11, 2020, the Nepal Agricultural Research Council (NARC) announced the release of six new wheat varieties for multiplication and distribution to the country’s wheat farmers, offering increased production for Nepal’s nearly one million wheat farmers and boosted nutrition for its 28 million wheat consumers.
The varieties, which are derived from materials developed by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), include five bred for elevated levels of the crucial micronutrient zinc, and Borlaug 100, a variety well known for being high yielding, drought- and heat-resilient, and resistant to wheat blast, as well as high in zinc.
“Releasing six varieties in one attempt is historic news for Nepal,” said CIMMYT Asia Regional Representative and Principal Scientist Arun Joshi.
“It is an especially impressive achievement by the NARC breeders and technicians during a time of COVID-related challenges and restrictions,” said NARC Executive Director Deepak Bhandari.
“This was a joint effort by many scientists in our team who played a critical role in generating proper data, and making a strong case for these varieties to the release committee, ” said Roshan Basnet, head of the National Wheat Research Program based in Bhairahawa, Nepal, who was instrumental in releasing three of the varieties, including Borlaug 2020.
“We are very glad that our hard work has paid off for our country’s farmers,” said Dhruba Thapa, chief and wheat breeder at NARC’s National Plant Breeding and Genetics Research Centre.
Nepal produces 1.96 million tons of wheat on more than 750,000 hectares, but its wheat farmers are mainly smallholders with less than 1-hectare holdings and limited access to inputs or mechanization. In addition, most of the popular wheat varieties grown in the country have become susceptible to new strains of wheat rust diseases.
The new varieties — Zinc Gahun 1, Zinc Gahun 2, Bheri-Ganga, Himganga, Khumal-Shakti and Borlaug 2020 — were bred and tested using a “fast-track” approach, with CIMMYT and NARC scientists moving material from trials in CIMMYT’s research station in Mexico to multiple locations in Nepal and other Target Population of Environments (TPEs) for testing.
“Thanks to a big effort from Arun Joshi and our NARC partners we were able to collect important data in first year, reducing the time it takes to release new varieties,” said CIMMYT Head of Wheat Improvement Ravi Singh.
The varieties are tailored for conditions in a range of wheat growing regions in the country — from the hotter lowland, or Terai, regions to the irrigated as well as dryer mid- and high-elevation areas — and for stresses including wheat rust diseases and wheat blast. The five high-zinc, biofortified varieties were developed through conventional crop breeding by crossing modern high yielding wheats with high zinc progenitors such as landraces, spelt wheat and emmer wheat.
“Zinc deficiency is a serious problem in Nepal, with 21% of children found to be zinc deficient in 2016,” explained said CIMMYT Senior Scientist and wheat breeder Velu Govindan, who specializes in breeding biofortified varieties. “Biofortification of staple crops such as wheat is a proven method to help reverse and prevent this deficiency, especially for those without access to a more diverse diet.”
Borlaug 2020 is equivalent to Borlaug 100, a highly prized variety released in 2014 in adbMexico to commemorate the centennial year of Nobel Peace laureate Norman E. Borlaug. Coincidently, its release in Nepal coincides with the 50th anniversary of Borlaug’s Nobel Peace Prize.
NARC staff have already begun the process of seed multiplication and conducting participatory varietal selection trials with farmers, so very soon farmers throughout the country will benefit from these seeds.
“The number of new varieties and record release time is amazing,” said Joshi. “We now have varieties that will help Nepal’s farmers well into the future.”
CIMMYT breeding of biofortified varieties was funded by HarvestPlus. Variety release and seed multiplication activities in Nepal were supported by NARC and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) through collaboration with ADB Natural Resources Principal & Agriculture Specialist Michiko Katagami. This NARC-ADB-CIMMYT collaboration was prompted by World Food Prize winner and former HarvestPlus CEO Howarth Bouis, and provided crucial support that enabled the release in a record time.
The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) is the global leader in publicly-funded maize and wheat research and related farming systems. Headquartered near Mexico City, CIMMYT works with hundreds of partners throughout the developing world to sustainably increase the productivity of maize and wheat cropping systems, thus improving global food security and reducing poverty. CIMMYT is a member of the CGIAR System and leads the CGIAR Research Programs on Maize and Wheat and the Excellence in Breeding Platform. The Center receives support from national governments, foundations, development banks and other public and private agencies. For more information, visit staging.cimmyt.org.
ABOUT NARC:
Nepal Agricultural Research Council (NARC) was established in 1991 as an autonomous organization under Nepal Agricultural Research Council Act – 1991 to conduct agricultural research in the country to uplift the economic level of Nepalese people.
ABOUT ADB:
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is committed to achieving a prosperous, inclusive, resilient, and sustainable Asia and the Pacific, while sustaining its efforts to eradicate extreme poverty. It assists its members and partners by providing loans, technical assistance, grants, and equity investments to promote social and economic development.
Farmer Raj Narayin Singh stands in his wheat field in Bihar, India. (Photo: Petr Kosina/CIMMYT)
Since the earliest days of global wheat breeding at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), breeders have made their crossing selections to meet farmers’ requirements in specific environments throughout the world’s wheat-growing regions.
To streamline and make this trait selection process consistent, in the 1970s CIMMYT breeders developed 15 mega-environments — sets of farming, climatic, weather, and geographic conditions to use as profiles for testing their varieties.
They took this a step further in the 1980s by developing sets of profiles for their varieties with common characteristics in current — and projected — climatic, soil and hydrological characteristics as well as socioeconomic features such as end-use quality and agronomic practices.
In newly presented research, CIMMYT wheat scientist Leo Crespo has taken another look at these mega-environments in the form of target population of environments (TPE) — specifically the ones that fall in the bread basket wheat production area of India — to create more nuanced definitions based on updated underlying conditions and desired traits.
Using meteorological and soil data, along with information about farmers’ practices in each region and more advanced analytical methods, Crespo defined three new specific TPEs for the region:
TPE1, in the optimally irrigated Northwestern Plain Zone with higher yield potential;
TPE2, in the irrigated, heat-stressed Northeastern Plains Zone; and
TPE3, in the drought-stressed Central-Peninsular Zone.
These TPEs encompass more than 28 million hectares, equivalent to more than 97% of India’s total wheat production area.
“While the mega-environments can be broad and transcontinental, we defined the TPE at a more regional level,” said Crespo. “In fact, two of our new TPEs — the NWPZ (TPE1) and part of the NEPZ (TPE2) — have distinct climate and soil characteristics, but they both fall under the same mega-environment: ME1.”
Elite wheat varieties at CIMMYT’s experimental station in Ciudad Obregon, Mexico. (Photo: Marcia MacNeil/CIMMYT)
Comparing international environments
Crespo later cross-checked these TPEs with the testing environments that CIMMYT wheat breeders use in the research station in Obregon, in Mexico’s Sonora Valley.
Obregon has long been valued by wheat breeders worldwide for its unique capacity to simulate many wheat growing conditions. Wheat grown in the various testing environments replicate in Obregon — known as selection environments (SEs) — goes through an arduous testing process including testing in other agroeconomic zones and undergoing pest and disease infestations to demonstrate its resilience.
This process, though intensive, is much cheaper and more efficient than testing each potential new wheat line in every major wheat growing area. That is why it is so important to verify that the decisions made in Obregon are the right ones for farmers in the diverse growing areas of the world.
Crespo used data from one of CIMMYT’s global wheat trials, the Elite Spring Wheat Yield Trials (ESWYT), to estimate the genetic correlation between the TPEs and in Obregon, selection response indicators and performance prediction. He found that wheat lines that perform well in the Obregon selection environments are very likely to display high performance in the TPEs he defined in India.
“Our results provide evidence that the selection environments in CIMMYT’s Obregon research station correlate with international sites, and this has led to high genetic gains in targeted regions,” explained Crespo.
“We can achieve even greater gains by targeting selections for farmers in the TPEs and improving the testing in those TPEs, along with the high-quality evaluations from the selection environment.”
These findings confirming the relationship between the selection environments and farmers’ fields in one of the world’s largest wheat growing regions allow CIMMYT to realize its mission to deliver superior wheat germplasm to national partners for their breeding programs, or for direct release as varieties for farmers throughout the world.
Four scientists working with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) have been recognized as 2020 recipients of the Clarivate™ Highly Cited Researchers list.
The honor recognizes exceptional research performance demonstrated by the production of multiple papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and year, according to the Web of Science citation indexing service.
Called a “who’s who” of influential researchers, the list draws on data and analysis performed by bibliometric experts and data scientists at the Institute for Scientific Information™ at Clarivate.
The 2020 CIMMYT honorees include:
José Luis Francisco Crossa: CIMMYT Distinguished Scientist.
Julio Huerta: CIMMYT-seconded wheat breeder and rust geneticist with Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Forestales, Agrícolas y Pecuarias (INIFAP).
Matthew Reynolds: CIMMYT Distinguished Scientist, wheat physiologist and member, Mexican Academy of Sciences.
Ravi Singh: CIMMYT Distinguished Scientist and Head of Bread Wheat Improvement.
“I congratulate my colleagues in the Global Wheat Program for this excellent recognition of their important work,” said incoming CIMMYT Global Wheat Program Director Alison Bentley.
Building on a wealth of existing investment in UK wheat research and development, including the UK Research and Innovation BBSRC-funded Designing Future Wheat programme (DFW), the International Wheat Yield Partnership (IWYP) has formed a new European Winter Wheat Hub that will accelerate research discoveries from the UK and globally into commercial plant breeding.
A public-private partnership, the IWYP-European Winter Wheat Hub will combine novel traits discovered by collaborative international teams into a range of high performing European winter wheat genetic backgrounds for assessment and use in winter wheat breeding programs.
The global agriculture companies BASF, KWS, RAGT and Syngenta, in collaboration with the UK National Institute for Agricultural Botany (NIAB), will provide a translational pipeline supporting European winter wheat improvement. In partnership with IWYP, commercial breeders will select key genetic discoveries of potential value for the European wheat community from global IWYP research projects. NIAB will then use its expertise in pre-breeding to produce genetic material for the validation and development of selected IWYP research outputs.
Joining the wider existing IWYP Hub Network of large translational pipelines operating on spring wheat at CIMMYT (the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre) in Mexico and the recently established NIFA-IWYP Winter Wheat Breeding Innovation Hub at Kansas State University, USA, the IWYP-European Winter Wheat Hub will ensure that cutting-edge discoveries are rapidly available to both the participating wheat breeders and to the global wheat breeding community.
“This is another excellent example of how public-private partnerships (such as the DFW, the Wheat Initiative and IWYP) can work well at both the international and national level,” said Chris Tapsell from KWS, who is leading the IWYP-European Winter Wheat Hub development.
“And this hub will help ensure that the hard work of the IWYP researchers around the world will deliver impacts that address the twin challenges of increasing wheat production for food security whilst protecting the environment.”
Jeff Gwyn, who leads the IWYP program said, “The addition of this new hub further strengthens the IWYP Hub Network and enables the development of our innovations to reach a wider industry base more rapidly. It is critical for IWYP to have its research outputs taken up and utilized for the public good. Public-private partnerships such as this further demonstrate that the IWYP initiative is filling a significant gap and creating value.”
Tina Barsby, CEO of NIAB commented, “NIAB has a strong track record in pre-breeding of wheat and particularly in working closely with commercial breeders to bring new variability to the market. We are really looking forward to helping to advance IWYP project traits into breeding programs.”
The IWYP program is based on an innovative model for public funding and international scientific collaboration to address the global grand challenge of food, nutritional and economic security for the future. The model employs public-private partnerships to scale and drive its research innovations for impact. Operations require active coordination of the international research and development teams whose discovery research focuses on complementary and overlapping sets of potentially high impact novel trait targets deemed likely to underpin yield increases, such as the regulation of photosynthesis, optimal plant architecture, plant biomass distribution, and grain number and size. As the results emerge, it is possible to envisage how to combine them and therefore simultaneously remove multiple constraints affecting yields in farmers’ fields. https://iwyp.org/
NIAB is an independent plant biosciences organisation working to translate fundamental research into innovative solutions and products for the agricultural sector. The IWYP-European Winter Wheat Hub will leverage established expertise in wheat genetics and breeding at NIAB, including newly developed glasshouse and molecular laboratory facilities.
https://www.niab.com/
BASF, KWS, RAGT and Syngenta are innovation-led leaders in the wheat breeding industry, developing varieties that deliver consistent year-on-year genetics gain for the benefit of wheat growers throughout Europe and North America. All companies are active members of IWYP and launched this initiative to speed up and ensure the effective utilization of deliverables from IWYP research projects, which are funded by partners across the globe including the BBSRC in the UK.
www.kws.com
www.ragt.fr
www.basf.com
www.syngenta.com
CIMMYT field workers working on wheat crossing as part of the breeding process. (Photo: CIMMYT)
A recent webinar organized by the CGIAR Excellence in Breeding Platform (EiB) and Accelerating Genetic Gains in Maize and Wheat for Improved Livelihoods (AGG) project, invited national agricultural research systems, seed companies, other interested breeders to explore tools, techniques and transitions toward a continuous improvement culture in breeding.
Continuous improvement (CI) is an approach that is being used to modernize breeding programs, to ensure they consistently get significantly improved varieties in farmers’ fields. It helps teams create a new way of thinking and working. The goal is to ensure striving for excellence becomes part of an organizational culture. To get there, CI provides a set of clear principles and tools to help diagnose problems and then solve them.
The webinar featured a leading international CI expert —Theresa Heitman, an EiB consultant — who introduced the Lean Improvement Methodology, an approach to help breeders grow their programs and improve results without adding more resources. It examines the way breeders create value for the customer, using specific methods and tools to reduce or eliminate non-value added activities.
Other presenters included B.M. Prasanna from the CGIAR Research Program on Maize, Gustavo Teixeira and Theresa Heitman from EiB and Dan Makumbi from EiB and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), Marcelo Almeida from Syngenta, and Sharifah Shahrul from the International Rice Research Center (IRRI).
The CI webinar is part of a series of webinars co-organized by EiB and AGG. Forthcoming sessions will cover assessing genetic gains and other topics.
The CGIAR Research Program on Wheat (WHEAT) has “a track record of delivering local solutions with a global perspective — and is well positioned to continue this trajectory in the next decade.”
This was a key finding of a recent review of the program aimed to assess WHEAT’s 2017-2019 delivery of quality science and effectiveness, as well as to provide insights and lessons to inform the program’s future.
“Wheat as a crop is bound to be central to global food security in the foreseeable future,” the reviewers stated.
The crop currently contributes 20% of the world population’s calories and protein — and global demand is estimated to increase by 44% between 2005-07 and 2050.
WHEAT — led by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) with the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) as a key research partner — has two pillars that are essential to meeting this demand: raising potential yield through breeding and closing the yield gap through sustainable intensification at field, farm and landscape scales.
Key recommendations included supporting strategic investment in research partner network development and maintenance and continuing WHEAT’s trajectory towards modernizing breeding processes and integrating sustainable intensification approaches, including mechanization.
The reviewers warned of challenges for the way ahead, pointing out that partnerships — and WHEAT’s reputation as a reliable partner — are vulnerable to funding volatility. The review also raised concerns about the potential fragmentation of the global breeding program, restrictions to the international exchange of germplasm and ideas, “misguided” emphasis on minor crops, and CGIAR’s “focus on process at the expense of results.”
“This review cuts to the core of what’s so critical — and at risk — not only with our program but wheat research in general,” said Hans Braun, director of CIMMYT’s Global Wheat Program and the CGIAR Research Program on Wheat. “Global collaboration and the exchange of improved seeds, data, and especially information.”
“The reviewers rightly point out that limited resources will lead to competition and dampen this collaboration — even between scientists in the same program. We must address this potential risk to improve integration and continue our life saving work,” Braun explained.
“In most of the developing world, the alliance of public sector and CGIAR wheat breeding programs, as well as some national public breeding programs on their own, will remain dominant providers of wheat varieties, until either functioning seed royalty collection systems are established and/or hybrid wheat becomes a reality,” he said.
WHEAT’s strength is its robust global network of research for development partners and scientists linked to global breeding in a ‘wide adaptation’ approach,” said Victor Kommerell, program manager for the CGIAR Research Programs on Maize and Wheat.
“This review underscores that breaking up the breeding program could cause lasting damage to this network,” Kommerell said.
More key findings of the review include:
WHEAT is effective and well-managed: In 2017-2019, WHEAT mainly achieved its planned outputs and outcomes and in addition achieved unplanned outcomes. For the three years reviewed, WHEAT did not drop any research line.
WHEAT’s strength is its partnerships: WHEAT has catalyzed a global network of research and development (R&D) that has delivered and continues to deliver a disproportionate wealth of outputs in relation to investment.
WHEAT creates, and thrives on, collaboration: The predominantly public nature of wheat R&D (In the period 1994-2014, the public sector accounted for 63% of global wheat varietal releases and more than 95% of releases in developing countries) favors collaboration, compared with other industries.
WHEAT facilitates shared success: The long history of collaboration between CIMMYT, ICARDA and national partners has fostered a sense of belonging to the International Wheat Improvement Network that permits free exchange of information and germplasm, allowing the best varieties to be released, irrespective of origin. International nursery testing delivers elite lines for national program use; data shared by national programs informs WHEAT’s next crossing cycle.
This story was originally posted on the website of the CGIAR Research Program on Wheat (wheat.org).
Cover photo: Wheat trainees and CIMMYT staff examine wheat plants in the field at the experimental station in Toluca, Mexico. (Photo: Alfonso Cortés/CIMMYT)
The process for breeding for grain yield in bread wheat at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) involves three-stage testing at an experimental station in the desert environment of Ciudad Obregón, in Mexico’s Yaqui Valley. Because the conditions in Obregón are extremely favorable, CIMMYT wheat breeders are able to replicate growing environments all over the world and test the yield potential and climate-resilience of wheat varieties for every major global wheat growing area. These replicated test areas in Obregón are known as selection environments (SEs).
This process has its roots in the innovative work of wheat breeder and Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug, more than 50 years ago. Wheat scientists at CIMMYT, led by wheat breeder Philomin Juliana, wanted to see if it remained effective.
The scientists conducted a large quantitative genetics study comparing the grain yield performance of lines in the Obregón SEs with that of lines in target growing sites throughout the world. They based their comparison on data from two major wheat trials: the South Asia Bread Wheat Genomic Prediction Yield Trials in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh initiated by the U.S. Agency for International Development Feed the Future initiative and the global testing environments of the Elite Spring Wheat Yield Trials.
The authors found higher average heritabilities, or trait variations due to genetic differences, for grain yield in the Obregón SEs than in the target sites (44.2 and 92.3% higher for the South Asia and global trials, respectively), indicating greater precision in the SE trials than those in the target sites. They also observed significant genetic correlations between one or more SEs in Obregón and all five South Asian sites, as well as with the majority (65.1%) of the Elite Spring Wheat Yield Trial sites. Lastly, they found a high ratio of selection response by selecting for grain yield in the SEs of Obregón than directly in the target sites.
“The results of this study make it evident that the rigorous multi-year yield testing in Obregón environments has helped to develop wheat lines that have wide-adaptability across diverse geographical locations and resilience to environmental variations,” said Philomin Juliana, CIMMYT associate scientist and lead author of the article.
“This is particularly important for smallholder farmers in developing countries growing wheat on less than 2 hectares who cannot afford crop losses due to year-to-year environmental changes.”
In addition to these comparisons, the scientists conducted genomic prediction for grain yield in the target sites, based on the performance of the same lines in the SEs of Obregón. They found high year-to-year variations in grain yield predictabilities, highlighting the importance of multi-environment testing across time and space to stave off the environment-induced uncertainties in wheat yields.
“While our results demonstrate the challenges involved in genomic prediction of grain yield in future unknown environments, it also opens up new horizons for further exciting research on designing genomic selection-driven breeding for wheat grain yield,” said Juliana.
This type of quantitative genetics analysis using multi-year and multi-site grain yield data is one of the first steps to assessing the effectiveness of CIMMYT’s current grain yield testing and making recommendations for improvement—a key objective of the new Accelerating Genetic Gains in Maize and Wheat for Improved Livelihoods (AGG) project, which aims to accelerate the breeding progress by optimizing current breeding schemes.
This work was made possible by the generous support of the Delivering Genetic Gain in Wheat (DGGW) project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) and managed by Cornell University; the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Feed the Future initiative; and several collaborating national partners who generated the grain yield data.
