The Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) has warned wheat growing farmers in Pakistan to keep a close eye on the spread of yellow rust disease which might evolve in new forms.
Read more here: https://www.dawn.com/news/1532759/growers-issued-yellow-rust-warning
B.M Prasanna, Director of CIMMYT’s Global Maize Program and the CGIAR Research Program on Maize, says agriculture scientists have set their focus on making cultivation a profitable venture.
The CIMMYT germplasm bank is located near Texcoco, Mexico and is known for Norman Borlaug, father of modern agriculture and the “Green Revolution” who fought hunger in the later 1940s.
Read more here: https://www.excelsior.com.mx/nacional/mexico-quiere-seguir-siendo-el-pueblo-del-maiz/1360678#.Xi9bHcgLM3U.twitter
The worst desert-locust plague in Kenya in 70 years is threatening to spread further into East Africa, jeopardizing food security.
Swarms of the insects are already devouring crops and pasture in Ethiopia and Somalia, and they’re breeding in Djibouti, Eritrea and Sudan — all areas that are prone to drought and food shortages. There’s a high risk they may soon enter northeast Uganda and southeast South Sudan, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization said Friday.
In Kenya, the locusts have mainly ravaged pasture, putting livestock production at risk, Hugo de Groote, an agricultural economist with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, said by phone. There is a need to monitor and control the insects to ensure swarms don’t reach the more southerly counties that grow corn, tea and coffee, he said.
Read more here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-25/vast-locust-swarm-casts-shadow-over-east-african-food-security
Seed banks, like the one at CIMMYT’s headquarters in Mexico, are part of planning for the future of food. CIMMYT protects the biodiversity of maize and wheat with more than 30,000 samples of maize and 150,000 of wheat.
Watch video here.
The grower of the world’s largest corn cob is farmer Jesús Nazario Elías Moctezuma, who won the annual corn cob competition in Jala, Nayarit, in December. He acknowledges the work of INIFAP, CIMMYT and the Mexico Corn Tortilla Foundation to recuperate native maize species.
Read more here: https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/worlds-largest-corn-cob/
Simon Fonteyne, Miguel Angel Martinez, Abel Saldivia and Nele Verlhust conducted an investigation on conservation agriculture, and found that conservation agriculture under irrigation conditions increases yields and soil organic carbon, even in poor quality soil.
Read more here: https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/nacion/trabajan-en-metodo-para-aprovechar-suelo
Pakistan has released 20 new high-yielding, disease-resistant and climate change–resilient wheat and maize varieties during the year.
The achievement came mainly on the back of a partnership between the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) and the Pakistan Agricultural Research Council (PARC) with support from the US development agency USAID.
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The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) introduced farmers Kassim Massi and Joyce Makawa to conservation agriculture, along with five other families in their community.
“I have learnt a lot from this experiment. I can see that with crop rotation, mulching and intercropping I get bigger and healthier maize cobs. The right maize spacing, one seed at the time planted in a row, creates a good canopy which preserves the soil moisture in addition to the mulch effect,” Massi explains.
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How big do farms need to be to enable farmers to escape poverty by farming alone? And what alternative avenues can lead them to sustainable development? New paper explores how much rural households can benefit from agricultural intensification.
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As climate change creates new challenges for farmers in Mexico, different landraces could prove extremely valuable to farmers. Different varieties of maize are able to grow in harsh weather conditions, and some could hold the key to using fewer chemicals in farming.
Over centuries, indigenous growers bred some 59 different native varieties of maize, or “landraces,” according to CIMMYT, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, which preserves the seeds of some 48,000 maize varieties from all over the world at a seed bank in the town of Texcoco near Mexico City. Unlike commercial varieties sold by companies like Monsanto, landraces are highly adapted to the soil and climate of the communities where they are grown.
“Farmers keep selecting seeds from plants that do survive in extreme conditions to plant them in the following year,” said Martha Willcox, a geneticist at CIMMYT.
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How big do farms need to be to enable farmers to escape poverty by farming alone? And what alternative avenues can lead them to sustainable development?
These issues were explored in a paper in which we examined how much rural households can benefit from agricultural intensification. In particular we, together with colleagues, looked at the size of smallholder farms and their potential profitability and alternative strategies for support. In sub-Saharan Africa smallholder farms are, on average, smaller than two hectares.
Read more here: https://theconversation.com/can-african-smallholders-farm-themselves-out-of-poverty-126692
CIMMYT study finds that women are 33% more likely to pay for blue maize tortillas and men are 19% more likely. A person’s income had no impact on the willingness to pay more for blue maize.
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Food entrepreneur Jorge Gaviria had the idea to small-scale farmers one by one who had surplus corn, buy it from them at market price and then import it to the United States. He partnered with CIMMYT to build up relationships with farmers, working out intricate systems that would determine fair prices and ensure that they were only buying surplus corn.
Read more here.
To protect crops, a rapid alert system has been developed which is able to predict the spread of wheat rust and warns policy makers and farmers allowing timely and targeted interventions.
The project involved a multidisciplinary team – biologists, meteorologists, agronomists, IT and telecommunications experts – and the system was developed by the University of Cambridge, the Met Office of Great Britain, the Ethiopian Agricultural Research Institute (EIAR), the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).
At the base of it all is the data. Read more here.