ESKISEHIR, Turkey — The 5th International Master Class on Soil Borne Pathogens of Wheat held at the Transitional Zone Agricultural Research Institute (TZARI), Eskisehir, Turkey, on 11-23 July 2016, brought together 45 participants from 16 countries of Central and West Asia and North Africa.

During the opening ceremony, participants were welcomed by Yusuf Aslan, head of Field Crop Research, Turkish Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Livestock (MFAL), Suat Kaymak, Plant Health Department head, MFAL, Sabri Cakir, TZARI director, and Amer Dababat, leader, Soil Borne Pathogens Program, CIMMYT-Turkey.

This intensive residential master class built on the success of previous Crawford Fund Master Classes on SBP (Turkey 2000 and 2010; China 2005; and Tunisia 2008). Its key objectives were to: (1) expand the existing soil borne pathogen (SBP) capacity of researchers from Central and West Asia and North Africa to help them better understand and work with SBP of cereals; (2) help these politically and food insecure regions — in particular, Syria, Iraq, North Africa, and Afghanistan — to re-build SBP capacity; and (3) refine and publish the existing Master Class Theoretical Manual for this Master Class and create an electronic version to be used in future training activities.

This year’s master class was taught by a total of 15 specialists, including three renowned experts from abroad: Timothy Paulitz, Research Plant Pathologist, USDA-ARS, Pullman, WA; Grant Hollaway, cereal plant pathologist, Australia; and Ian Riley, nematologist, Australia. The quality of the scientific program and the participation of SBP specialists from various countries made it a highly successful course.

Among other things, class participants learned how to isolate, extract and identify SBP in order to properly diagnose their SBP problems, as well as use host resistance and other environmentally friendly control methods to control the pathogens. They also focused on how to incorporate SBP resistance breeding into a cereal breeding program and apply molecular biology to identify and breed SBP resistant germplasm.

The class helped to further develop participants’ research management, technical and personal capacities, and hone their proposal writing skills. Finally, it fostered the establishment of a regional network of pathologists (including key CGIAR pathologists) to work on SBPs.

Upon returning to their home countries, participants will become involved in researching SBPs, which will ultimately benefit farmers and the industry. This will also forge better linkages between the master class and other national institutes in the region and enable them to jointly combat SBPs, alleviate hunger and contribute to food security.

This latest course was organized and coordinated by Abdelfattah Dababat, SBP Specialist, CIMMYT-Turkey, as part of the ICARDA CIMMYT Wheat Improvement Program (ICWIP), and funded by CIMMYT, MFAL, Syngenta, The Crawford Fund, ACIAR, and GRDC.

For more information, please contact Abdelfattah A. Dababat at a.dababat@cgiar.org 

NAIROBI, Kenya (CIMMYT) – The recent inauguration of a new seed storage cold room at the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO) research center at Kiboko in Makueni County, about 155 kilometers from the capital, adds to the top notch research establishments managed by the national partners in Africa together with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). This  successful partnership  continues to help farmers overcome crippling challenges in farming and to realize the yield potential of improved varieties.

Since its establishment in Africa, over 40 years ago, CIMMYT has prioritized high quality research work in state-of-the-art research facilities developed through long-standing partnerships with national research organizations, such as KALRO.

“If CIMMYT were to be established today, it would be headquartered in Africa because this is where smallholder farmers face the biggest challenges.  At the same time, this is the place where outstanding work is being done to help the farmers rise above the challenges, and with great success,” said Martin Kropff, CIMMYT Director General during his recent visit to Kenya.

The cold room jointly inaugurated by Kropff, and KALRO Director General, Eliud Kireger will help store high value maize seeds with an array of traits including resilience to diseases, insect-pests and climatic stresses as drought and heat, for up to 10 years, without the need for seed regeneration every year, thereby avoiding risk of contamination and use of scarce resources.  It will also help make seed readily available for distribution to national partners and seed companies to reach the farmers much faster.

Kireger conveyed his appreciation for the cold room and other research facilities established on KALRO sites, terming these achievements as “rewarding not just to KALRO and to the seed companies, but to many smallholders in Africa, who continue to be the inspiration behind every effort put into maize research and development work by KALRO and partners like CIMMYT.”

In addition to the seed storage cold room, Africa hosts the maize lethal necrosis (MLN) disease screening facility in sub-Saharan Africa. The MLN screening facility was established in 2013 at KALRO Naivasha Center in Kenya in response to the outbreak of the devastating MLN disease in eastern Africa. The facility since then has supported both the private and public institutions to screen maize germplasm for MLN under artificial inoculation and in identifying MLN tolerant/resistant lines and hybrids.

“The MLN screening facility (also a quarantine site) has been supporting the national partners in sub-Saharan Africa, key multinational, local and regional seed companies and CGIAR centers.  This facility has become a major resource in the fight against MLN regionally,” added B.M. Prasanna, Director of CIMMYT’s Global Maize Program as well as the CGIAR Research Program MAIZE. “Tremendous progress has been made through this facility in the last three years. Several promising maize lines with tolerance and resistance to MLN have been identified, and used in breeding programs to develop improved maize hybrids. Already five MLN-tolerant hybrids have been released and now being scaled-up by seed companies for reaching the MLN-affected farmers in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. As many as 22 MLN-tolerant and resistant hybrids are presently undergoing national performance trials in east Africa,” remarked Prasanna.

Another major focus of CIMMYT and partners in the region is to prevent the spread of MLN from the endemic to non-endemic countries in Africa.  “This is a strong message to convey that we not only work hard to develop MLN resistant maize varieties for the farmers, but we are also very keen to control the spread of the disease” remarked Kropff during a visit to the site.

In Zimbabwe, an MLN quarantine facility has been established in 2016, in collaboration with the government. This facility is key for safe transfer of research materials, including those with MLN resistance into the currently MLN non-endemic countries in southern Africa, before they get to the partners.

In order to keep up with the emerging stresses and to accelerate development of improved maize varieties, the maize Doubled-Haploid (DH) facility was established in 2013 by CIMMYT and KALRO at the KALRO research center in Kiboko. This facility helps the breeders to significantly shorten the process of developing maize parental lines from 7–8 seasons (using conventional breeding) to just 2–3 seasons.

“Through the facility at Kiboko, we have been able to develop over 60,000 DH lines in 2015 from diverse genetic backgrounds. The DH facility also supports the national agricultural research organisations and small and medium enterprise partners in sub-Saharan Africa to fast-track their breeding work through DH lines,” said Prasanna.

For wheat research-for-development work in Africa, the largest stem rust phenotyping platform in the world sits at KALRO research center in Njoro, Kenya. The facility screens at least 50,000 wheat accessions annually from 20-25 countries. Following the emergence of the Ug99 wheat rust disease pathogen strain in Uganda, the disease spread to 13 countries in Africa. Close to 65 wheat varieties that are resistant to Ug99 stem rust disease have been released globally as a result of the shuttle breeding that includes selection from the screening site at KALRO Njoro.

“CIMMYT’s yearly investment of USD 37 million in Africa through various projects has translated into a success story because of the strong collaboration with our partners across Africa,” said Stephen Mugo, CIMMYT’s Regional Representative for Africa. He further added that “research work in Africa is not yet done. No institution, including CIMMYT, cannot do this important work alone.  We need to, and will, keep on working together with partners to improve the livelihoods of the African smallholders.”

Key funders of CIMMYT work in Africa include, the USAID, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Sygenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, Australian Centre for International Research, CGIAR Research Program on Maize, Foreign Affairs Trade and Development Canada.

KATHMANDU, Nepal (CIMMYT) —  Launched by CIMMYT in January 2013 in collaboration of five public sector institutions and three seed companies from four South Asian countries (Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan), the Heat Tolerant Maize for Asia (HTMA) project is a public-private partnership that targets resource-poor maize farmers in South Asia who face weather extremes and climate change effects.

Funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under the Feed the Future (FTF) initiative, HTMA receives significant contributions from various partner institutions and companies. As a result of meticulously planned research on fast-track development and deployment of heat tolerant maize hybrids in South Asia, within three years the first 18 heat resilient hybrids were licensed to HTMA partners for deployment and scale-out. The project’s outputs attracted the attention of other players in the region, especially private seed companies, who expressed their interest in becoming a part of HTMA. A total of 12 new partners (five seed companies each from Bangladesh and Pakistan and two from Nepal) formally joined the project. They participated for the first time in the project’s annual review and planning meeting jointly organized by the Nepal Agricultural Research Program (NARC) and CIMMYT in Kathmandu, Nepal, on 25-26 July 2016.

Executive Director Yamraj Pandey, NARC, Nepal, chaired the inaugural session of the fourth annual review and planning meeting. In his opening remarks, Pandey emphasized the importance of stress resilient maize hybrids for coping with climate change effects and highlighted the remarkable progress HTMA has made in such a short period, giving farmers in stress-prone maize growing Asian environments much-needed heat tolerant hybrids. B.M. Prasanna, Director of CIMMYT’s Global Maize Program and of CRP-MAIZE, gave an overview of the new CGIAR research program on Maize Agri-food Systems, its focus and priorities, and highlighted the importance of stress-resilient maize for improving food security and livelihoods, especially in regions vulnerable to climate change, such as the Asian tropics.

Hailu Tefera, Agricultural Resource Specialist, Bureau for Food Security, USAID, gave an update on the FTF initiative and highlighted its priorities, which include reducing poverty and malnutrition in children in target countries through accelerated inclusive agricultural growth and a high-quality diet. He also informed meeting participants that on 7 July 2016, the US Congress passed the Global Food Security Act (GFSA), which will make FTF into law. Senior CIMMYT maize physiologist and HTMA project leader P.H. Zaidi shared the latest progress made under HTMA including the identification of genomic regions for key heat tolerant traits, development of improved heat tolerant populations using genomic selection, testing of new hybrid combinations, identification of promising hybrids, and the latest capacity development efforts.

At a series of technical sessions, project objective leaders, including Mitch Tuinstra, Purdue University professor, Sudha Nair, CIMMYT molecular maize breeder, and M.T. Vinayan, CIMMYT maize stress specialist for South Asia, presented the latest research results in each objective. HTMA leaders from public and private sector partners presented results of HTMA trials conducted at their locations/countries, and shared a list of top-ranking, best-bet heat-tolerant maize hybrids that will be subjected to large-scale testing and then deployed. They also described efforts aimed at disseminating HTMA hybrids through on-farm demonstrations and farmer-participatory selection of final products.. Most impressive was that each partner has identified a second batch of promising hybrids suitable for their target markets/agro-ecologies.

The project started a unique initiative aimed at developing hybrids using elite maize lines from Pioneer and HTMA. Kamal Pandey from Pioneer highlighted the performance of CIMMYT x Pioneer hybrids, which revealed the significant heterosis between CIMMYT and Pioneer maize germplasm, and should help identify promising joint hybrids suitable for stress-prone ecologies of South Asia. Zaidi and Tuinstra jointly presented HTMA’s progress on capacity development and provided updates on student research projects, including nine Ph.D. and six M.Sc. students, plus a total of 10 workshops/training courses organized so far on subjects such as precision phenotyping, molecular breeding, data management and seed systems. A total 303 participants have been trained, including researchers from public sector institutions and seed companies in Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan.

The meeting was attended by over 50 program leaders, scientists and representatives from collaborating institutions in South Asia, including BARI (Bangladesh), Nepal’s National Maize Research Program (NMRP), Pakistan’s Maize and Millet Research Institute, Bhutan’s national maize program, and two of India’s state agricultural universities. Also in attendance were partner seed companies in the region, including Pioneer Hi-Bred, Kaveri Seeds and Ajeet Seeds (India), and new seed company partners including Sean Seeds and Hariyali Community Seeds (Nepal); Jullundhar Pvt. Ltd., Kanzo Quality Seeds, CKD Seeds & Fertilizers, Hisell Seeds, and Zamindara Seeds (Pakistan); and Lalteer Seeds, Krishibid, BRAC, ACI Ltd., and Supreme Seeds (Bangladesh). International institutions such as Purdue University, USAID and CIMMYT also participated in the event.

The project’s progress and updates were critically reviewed by the project steering committee (PSC) headed by Prasanna, who expressed great satisfaction with its overall progress and achievements. Speaking for USAID, Hailu Tefera said they are highly impressed with HTMA’s progress and consider it a model public-private partnership. Other PSC members also expressed their satisfaction and agreed that the HTMA team deserves special appreciation for the remarkable progress they have achieved within just four years.

With its twisted cables and flickering computer screens, the room commandeered by the GENNOVATE study team at the headquarters of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) near Mexico City looks more like a Silicon Valley hackathon than what most would understand as gender research. Yet up on the main screen, questions are being asked of around 8,000 participants as part of a global gender study.

It is often a mystery why a new agricultural technology or practice can be successful in one community yet fail to have the desired effect in another. Social expectations of how men and women should behave may affect their ability to adopt or benefit from such innovations.

To understand how, researchers linked to 11 CGIAR research programs (CRPs) conducted guided discussion groups and interviews with women and men from 135 communities in 26 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

By recording and analyzing their personal testimony, GENNOVATE aims to develop insights and practical tools to improve research design in the CGIAR group of agricultural research institutes.

The study is qualitative, meaning that methods were used to encourage participants to discuss topics of interest to the researchers from their own perspective. It is also comparative, with the same methodology being applied across deliberately varied contexts, with men and women from different age groups and socio-economic backgrounds.

As part of the study, once transcripts were collected and translated from 2,025 interviews and discussion groups, the next step was to tag every statement made with codes that can be read by the social science software NVivo. These codes indicate exactly what was being said, by whom and in what context, so that researchers can analyze statements on a wide scale.

To help design the coding framework and guide implementation, GENNOVATE recruited Patti Petesch as a consultant. Petesch has worked on several high-profile projects on poverty and gender for the World Bank that use a similar approach, including On Norms and Agency: Conversations about gender equality with women and men in 20 countries. The coding work required the efforts of two teams based in Mexico and Peru.

“Our use of NVivo goes a lot further than any of the major studies I’ve worked on before,” Petesch said. “We’ve invested a lot in having this powerful tool for drawing out patterns across the different communities and population groups reached.”

Exploration begins

With the data collected and coded for analysis, the next question is what to look for. Using the data collected by the CIMMYT-led CRPs on Maize (MAIZE) and Wheat (WHEAT), the GENNOVATE team start by making exploratory queries – broad questions that might reveal patterns or contrasts in the testimony given by study participants across different contexts.

As an example, Petesch turns to a major topic of concern: “We find, for instance, young men and women on the outside nearly everywhere in the 27 communities visited by MAIZE,” Petesch said, explaining that young people encountered in the study were not frequently involved in agricultural decision-making.  “You can see it in the data, responses from adults on any agricultural topic number in the hundreds, while young people have much less to say.”

Through the analysis software, it is possible to ask the young participants in the study a hypothetical question: “What do you think the young men and women of your village should do when they finish studying?”

NVivo registers all of the statements by young people in which they mentioned an aspiration, showing that agriculture and natural resource management falls far behind non-agricultural livelihoods, education and parenting goals. Intriguingly, girls were twice as likely to hope for education in their future as boys.

This kind of general comparative analysis is of limited value, but helps to identify broad patterns and direct researchers to lessons about gender, agency and agriculture buried deeper in the data. NVivo also allows the researchers to dive right into crucial moments in the interviews and discussions, where what is being said is of importance to the question at hand. This allows their wide analysis to be supported by in-depth case studies of the research communities sampled.

Next steps

CIMMYT gender specialist Lone Badstue, who leads the GENNOVATE executive committee, envisions a two-track approach for GENNOVATE to have an impact: authoritative research and institutional change in the CGIAR consortium of agricultural researchers.

MAIZE and WHEAT are collaborating with nine other CRPs, aiming to produce their respective GENNOVATE CRP reports by the end of 2016. These reports will be used to inform discussion on the implications of the study findings for agricultural research in the CGIAR, while consultations will be held with biophysical scientists to create focused tools that help them integrate gender in their daily work.

“You could imagine a future where if someone asks if you are an agronomist, they would assume that you know about gender,” Badstue said. “There is only a small pool of experts, so now is a good time for a young person to get into agriculture.”

In the meantime, GENNOVATE has already had an impact in terms of the national researchers trained to carry out the fieldwork. “In each country one team was trained in gender studies and qualitative analysis. That kind of capacity is often rare and difficult to find,” Badstue emphasized.

KUNMING, China — The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) received a collaboration award recognizing contributions made to improving maize and wheat productivity, from the government in China’s Yunnan Province at a conference last month. CIMMYT scientist Dan Jeffers was on hand to receive the award at a ceremony held at the Innovation Conference, where the keynote speaker was Communist Party of China Secretary Jiheng Li, who described changes currently being made in the government to foster innovation.  Xingming Fan, from the Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and CIMMYT’s collaborating partner responsible for establishing a CIMMYT office in the province, was recognized for the development of the Yunrui 88 maize hybrid, which is widely grown by farmers in Yunnan.

CIMMYT has been working in collaboration with scientists from the Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences (YAAS) Institute of Food Crops for more than 40 years. During this period, scientists have introduced more than 4,000 maize and 9,500 wheat and barley genotypes, which have been used in their breeding programs to develop cultivars for farmers with  improved yield, stress tolerance, disease resistance and enhanced nutritional quality.  The impact of this work has received global recognition and many prestigious awards within China. Xingming Fan, director of the Institute of Food Crops, focused on maize and professor Yaxiong Yu in wheat, have been instrumental in developing cultivars for Yunnan farmers, and broadening the genetic base for maize and wheat for all of China.

Twenty two maize hybrids have been released at the provincial level and one hybrid at the national level.  Of these hybrids, several quality protein maize hybrids, including Yunyou 19, Yunrui 21, Yunrui 1 and the high oil hybrid Yunrui 8, have led to increased yields, stress tolerance and improved efficiency in animal husbandry in southern China. The unique grain characteristics in protein, starch and oil content have also benefited the food processing industry.

Due to the capacity of YAAS scientists and the location of Yunnan, CIMMYT placed a scientist at the academy to further expand collaborative efforts for the development of maize germplasm with high yields and improved stress tolerance for southern China and neighboring countries, as well as serving as donors of stress-resilient traits needed in China’s 33 million hectares of temperate maize.

Yunnan serves as an introduction point for CIMMYT’s wheat and barley experimental germplasm trails and for the ecological diversity of the province that allows YAAS scientists the potential to identify genotypes suited for use in the Yunnan breeding program as well to provide materials for over 20 organizations throughout China.  The wheat varieties Yunmai 39 and Yunmai 42 have received provincial awards, and barley variety Yundamai 2 has set national yield records.  CIMMYT wheat varieties cover 25 percent of Yunnan’s wheat area, and successful collaboration has led to staff training and the development of a shuttle breeding program with several countries.

LUSAKA, Zambia — For 62 year old Margaret Chisangano, life had been full of hard work. She used to rise early morning and carry out her tasks on her small farm – mainly growing maize without access to irrigation.

Chisangano lives in a rural village in Chongwe District of Zambia’s Lusaka Province. Average temperatures and erratic rainfalls in the region have been increasing, making it a daily challenge to feed her five grandchildren.

“Due to the harsh climate, farming was like gambling with nature,” she says. “Relying on the government’s relief food was only a temporary solution that did not solve our larger issues.”

Many farmers like Chisangano in rural Zambia are struggling to maintain their harvests while climate change makes it harder every year to produce a successful harvest. In the face of the drought crippling southern Africa, drought tolerant maize can reduce risks for farmers and allow for more consistent crop production in the face of climate variability. This enables farmers to allocate more land to higher-value crops with better economic returns, improving food security and incomes.

CIMMYT is working to improve access to good-quality maize through production and deployment of affordable and improved drought-tolerant, stress-resilient and high-yielding maize varieties for smallholder farmers throughout Zambia. Kamano Seed Company is one of six seed companies that CIMMYT partners with to improve maize production and marketing for small-scale farmers. The company provides drought-tolerant maize seeds, fertilizers and training to help farmers commercialize their production.

The company also focuses on increasing productivity and market access for farmers to drought-tolerant maize seed, and trains farmers on how to properly apply fertilizer that can help double or quadruple their maize yields.  Many farmers Kamano works with are growing maize commercially for the first time.

Chisangano was one of the first female farmers to join the contract farming project. Like many rural women in Zambia, she had little access to economic opportunities outside of subsistence farming.

To invest in developing agribusinesses, Kamano Seed Company is establishing links with banks to access loans to pay the farmers for their maize seed to avoid side marketing. The smallholder farmers also receive training in business skills, including record keeping, and the basics of contract farming.

“This new knowledge to look at farming as a business, and the training in record keeping, has changed my farming enterprise,” said Chisangano.  “Before, we did not treat farming as a business, and as a result we couldn’t earn any profits.”

Investing in agribusinesses development allows farm families to have a more consistent source of food and income throughout any given year, according to Nokutula Zimba, Kamano Seed Company senior marketing and sales officer. “In the long term, these farming activities help communities withstand future food crises and increase income-earning opportunities.”

In addition to on-the-ground development, CIMMYT provides input for greater seed policy reforms in southern Africa to facilitate easy seed movement across borders, and to make the variety release and registration processes more efficient.

Click here to learn more about what CIMMYT is doing to help maize farmers grow their business here.

Led by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, and implemented through in-country public and private partnerships, the Drought-Tolerant Maize for Africa Seed Scaling Project is supported by the United States Agency for International Development and emphasizes the scaling up and scaling out of drought tolerant maize seed and uptake by smallholder farmers. The project aims to produce close to 12,000 metric tons of certified seed for use by approximately 2.5 million people in six countries in eastern and southern Africa by the end of 2020.

WAGENINGEN, Netherlands — Although agriculture in the Indo-Gangetic Plains of South Asia, heartland of the Green Revolution, is essential to the food security and livelihoods of smallholder farmers, it is one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change variability. To cope with climate change variability and impacts, several climate-smart agricultural practices (CSAPs) have proved to increase crop productivity, resilience and adaptive capacity in the region’s agro-ecological zones. However, farmers’ perceptions of climate vulnerability and their response to CSAPs vary with their biophysical and socioeconomic circumstances, which can limit technology targeting and large-scale adoption by a diversity of farmers. Research aimed at understanding farming systems level opportunities and challenges has been conducted in order to promote sustainable agricultural intensification and develop a portfolio of CSAPs adapted to local conditions and diverse farm typologies.

With a similar objective, a workshop on farming systems analysis titled “Quantitative tools to explore future farming systems options and formalize trade-offs and synergies for their sustainable intensification in South Asia” was held at Wageningen University (WUR), The Netherlands, on 5-7 July 2016, under the aegis of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) and the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR). Students, scientists and professors from ICAR, WUR, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), CIMMYT, the Borlaug Institute for South Asia (BISA), and state agriculture universities India participated in the event, which was jointly coordinated by Santiago López and M.L. Jat, CIMMYT, and Jeroen Groot, WUR.

Santiago Lopez welcomed the participants and mentioned the workshop was aimed at promoting, among other things, an understanding of farming systems modeling and its scope in smallholder systems of South Asia; sharing advances on the parametrization of FarmDesign models; sharing results of research undertaken by WUR students on applying quantitative systems analysis in the Eastern Gangetic Plains (Bihar, India); and promoting the exchange of ideas among participants and experts from advanced research institutes on future research and collaboration opportunities.

Bruno Gerard, Director of CIMMYT’s Sustainable Intensification Program, highlighted the role farm level analysis plays in the program. Adam Komarek, IFPRI, talked about conservation agriculture and its role in increasing farm profits and reducing risks in western China. M.L. Jat provided his insights on how to promote large-scale adoption across Asia, while Gideon Kruseman from CIMMYT, Mexico, made a presentation on bio-economic modeling.

Jeroen Groot (WUR, FSE) gave a quick overview of FarmDesign and Fuzzy Cognitive mapping tools, while J.P. Tetrawal and H. S. Jat described how they applied the FarmDesign tool at two sites: Kota (India) and Karnal (India). A.K. Prusty and Vipin Kumar, ICAR-Indian Institute of Farming Systems Research (ICAR-IIFSR), described activities being undertaken on integrated farming systems by ICAR-IIFSR and presented the results of FarmDesign analyses.

Challenges faced during FarmDesign parameterization and interpretation were presented by the participants and solutions were discussed. A visit to the computer lab of WUR’s Farming Systems Ecology (FSE) provided hands-on experience in applying FarmDesign. At a debugging session, participants were helped by the expertise of resource persons and helped each other learn specific applications of FarmDesign.

At a planning session aimed at exploring project options, it was decided that a FarmDesign user group should be created for exchanging ideas and helping each other address issues related to the application of FarmDesign. A workshop will be held in India in November, 2016, to review the progress of the work being carried out, explore funding opportunities, and establish a faculty exchange program for capacity building and skill development.

WAGENINGEN, Netherlands — Agriculture is not considered a profit making venture by the farming community. Emerging challenges of climate change hinder growth and make it necessary to disseminate and promote the adoption of technological advances among farmers. Today it is vital not only to increase productivity but also ensure resource sustainability. Hence persuading farmers to adopt climate-smart agriculture (CSA) practices is critical for sustainably producing higher returns.

Under the aegis of the CGIAR research program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), CIMMYT and Wageningen University (WUR), The Netherlands, undertook activities to develop and scale innovative CSA business models at climate-smart village (CSV) sites in South Asia. To consolidate the work done and plan future activities, a workshop titled “Climate Smart Agriculture: Business modeling and innovation platforms for scaling” was held at WUR on 4 July 2016. Twenty-five participants from CIMMYT, India’s NARS (ICAR, SAU), WUR, KIT and private organizations attended the session.

Setting the objectives and context of the workshop, M.L. Jat, CIMMYT, and Annemarie Groot, Alterra, welcomed the participants. During a brainstorming session on climate smart agriculture as a business model and on how to use innovative platforms to promote it, participants expressed their views and improved their understanding of the issues. Building on the input of participants, Jaclyn Rooker (WUR) provided an introduction to business models and value systems, using the case of the Happy Seeder in Punjab, India, as an example.

The issue of commercialization in agriculture was discussed by participants. The scope and opportunities for developing a business model and addressing challenges to business model innovations were discussed in detail. Local innovation platforms and the success of laser land leveling in India were presented by M.L. Jat, CIMMYT, South Asia, to illustrate how technology adoption can impact livelihoods. “Opportunities for new business models and local innovation platforms need to be further explored,” stated Jat.

Annemarie Groot presented an overview of innovation platforms for business development and scaling and the research undertaken on these subjects. The meeting concluded with a discussion on the challenges of future research on business modeling and innovation platforms for scaling CSA. By sharing work experiences and engaging in participatory planning, workshop participants succeeded in finding ways to change the mindset of farmers while providing necessary support and guidance.