By Florence Sipalla/CIMMYT
The CIMMYT-Africa seed systems team met in Nairobi, Kenya, on 7 February to take stock of progress in 2013, identify challenges and brainstorm on turning those challenges into opportunities. Global Maize Program (GMP) Director B.M. Prasanna and members of the breeding, communications and socioeconomics teams also attended.
By Isaiah Nyagumbo/CIMMYT
Starting a personal conservation agriculture plot and providing training via group theater are some of the tactics an extension development officer in Malawi is using to reach farmers.
Fredrerick Lukhere, the local extension development officer for the Mtuthama Extension Planning Area, has led by example as part of the Sustainable Intensification of Maize-Legume Systems in Eastern and Southern Africa (SIMLESA) project, which is funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research. A SIMLESA team visited fields in the Kasungu district on 12 February. The team was led by Isaiah Nyagumbo, SIMLESA Southern Africa objective 2 coordinator, and included Gift Mashango, program manager; Jefias Mataruse, research assistant; Cyprian Mwale, national coordinator; Donwell Kamalongo, national objective 2 coordinator; Keneth Chaula, assistant chief agricultural extension officer; and others from the local district office.
More than 60 farmers, including 42 men and 20 women, participated in the tour. Initiated in 2010, SIMLESA activities in Malawi’s Kasungu District are in their fourth season. The project aims to improve the food security and incomes of 650,000 households in eastern and southern Africa within 10 years. Activities also aim to increase productivity by 30 percent and reduce downside risk by 30 percent through use of improved maize and legume varieties and conservation agriculture-based sustainable intensification technologies.
Lukhere has promoted SIMLESA activities using innovative techniques. He reinforces innovation platforms and partnerships founded on the Area Stakeholder Panel, a local community-based institution. He strengthens partnerships with local NGOs such as CADECOM and Total Land Care, subcontracted by SIMLESA to scale out sustainable intensification technologies. He has single-handedly trained NGO staff on how to set up and implement outscaling activities using SIMLESA’s outscaling model involving maizelegume (soybean) rotations.
Lukhere has also ensured the success of core exploratory trials, which were established in 2010 with six farmers in the area. The trials provide a learning platform and are also a source of research data. To increase farmer confidence in the technologies tested, Lukhere set up his own conservation agriculture plot planted with maize in 2012 and has increased the area to 0.5 hectares. The healthy and well-managed maize crop stands as a testimony to Luhkere’s efforts. He also runs a small drama group that trains farmers on SIMLESA technologies and performs to visitors and farmers during field days.
As a result of Luhkere’s efforts, at least 37 farmers are hosting outscaling trials; 84 follower or volunteer farmers are using these technologies without any support; and another 140 farmers are working through CADECOM in the surrounding extension planning areas. Total LandCare also supports farmers by providing herbicides and loans and hosts SIMLESA trials in neighboring extension planning areas.
By Brenna Goth/CIMMYT
A CIMMYT project in Nepal made significant progress in identifying local wheat diversity last year.
The project, “Collection, multiplication, characterization and safety duplication of wheat and barley landraces from Nepal,” led by Arun Kumar Joshi, principal scientist for the Global Wheat Program, began in January 2013 and will run until October 2015. National partners include Madan Raj Bhatta and Bal Krishna Joshi from the Nepal Agriculture Research Council, Khumaltar, Lalitpur.
Since the project began, researchers have developed guidelines “to explore, collect and characterize wheat and barley diversity,” according to the project’s 2013 Technical and Financial Progress Report. They found that traditional wheat diversity exists with opportunities for further exploration.
Researchers focused on the Baitadi, Dadeldhura and Doti districts in western Nepal, a traditional wheat region. Researchers visited Village Development Committees and farmers to collect seed and interviews. Farmers are still cultivating a variety of landraces, which feature drought tolerance and good chapatti quality. In total, 85 wheat accessions were collected and mapped along with 16 barley landraces. Employees from Nepal’s gene bank also helped with the effort.
The collections are currently under regeneration. The gene bank will send about 180 wheat and 50 barley collections to CIMMYT and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) by June 2015 for duplication.
By Raj Kumar Jat/CIMMYT
Nine Afghan farmers, including four women, recently learned about conservation agriculture in Pusa, Bihar, India.
Their visit to the Borlaug Institute for South Asia (BISA) on 18 January focused on advances in conservation agriculture (CA)-based management, improved wheat varieties and climate change variability coping strategies. The visit was part of an agribusiness study tour organized by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Representatives of the Government of Bihar met with the farmers at BISA-Pusa to hear their reactions to the latest technological developments. The delegation was led by Mohamed Ali and facilitated by Vijay Prakash, project director of the Agriculture Technology Management Agency (ATMA), Department of Agriculture, Government of Bihar.
Raj Kumar Jat, cropping systems agronomist for BISA, gave an overview of BISA-CIMMYT research-for-development activities and strategies for the region to improve crop productivity and farm profitability. He explained that BISA develops and promotes CA-based best practices for maize- and wheatbased cropping systems that directly benefit farmers in the region. BISA collaborates with the State Agricultural University, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, different CIMMYT programs such as the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA) and the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).
The delegation viewed agricultural machinery, strategic research trials and demonstration plots of wheat, maize, mustard and chickpea, which were planted on permanent raised beds using zero-tillage in laser-leveled fields. Jat explained different CA technologies and the comparative advantages of zero tillage, permanent raised bed planting and laser land leveling over conventional practices.
Farmers in the region face high labor costs and low labor availability, increasing energy prices and frequent climate variability, which require climate-resilient, lowcost alternatives to improve farm profitability. Jat said CA-based management practices can reduce production costs and improve resource-use efficiency, productivity and profitability. Planting different field crops on permanent raised beds using zero tillage reduces tillage and irrigation costs, improves water and nutrient-use efficiency and produces higher yields. He added that crop residue retention reduces weed population and improves soil fertility.
Inclusion of laser land leveling in conservation agriculture also saves water, promotes a uniform crop stand and improves nutrient-use efficiency and crop yields. Zero tillage seeding advances the sowing of different crops by one week, though the use of improved varieties and quality seed are equally important.
By Christian Thierfelder/CIMMYT
Gently undulating plains and green maize fields dominate the landscape of central Malawi as far as the eye can see. The ridges, furrows and bare soil in between, resulting from traditional land preparation, are common. Heavy rainfalls and accelerated soil erosion turn the Chia Lagoon, connected to Lake Malawi, brown and murky. The continued loss of soil fertility and the need to adapt to climate variability led CIMMYT and its partners to introduce conservation agriculture (CA) in Malawi in 2005.
The Nkhotakota district, where conservation agriculture systems have been widely adopted, shows changes in the landscape, such as residue-covered soil surfaces along the roadsides. Farmers are embracing the new CA concepts and are successfully growing maize directly planted with a pointed stick. CIMMYT and partner organizations including Total LandCare and the Ministry of Agriculture, funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development, support these efforts. The impacts of CA in Malawi are obvious. More than 30,000 farmers in the central part of the country have been informed about the practices and now use them on their own fields, which is a direct result of CIMMYT science and the concerted efforts of private, governmental extension and national research organizations.
Farmer Belemoti Sikelo, from the Mwansambo Extension Planning Area, has participated in the program for more than eight years. “I used to be a farmer that always ran out of maize grain in February or March and had to work for other farmers in the area to enable my family and me to survive,” Sikelo said. “Since I started using conservation agriculture practices, we have always had enough food during the critical months. I have expanded the land area under conservation agriculture on my farm and I have also tried conservation agriculture without expensive herbicides; I believe it is possible to apply conservation agriculture techniques without chemical weed control, but it needs good management and residue cover to reduce the weed pressure. Farmers around me come and visit my demonstration plots and ask me about my secrets for a good-looking maize crop. They admire the fields where I have planted groundnuts and maize under conservation agriculture.”
Disease pressure on traditionally monocropped maize has forced farmers to rotate maize with cowpeas, groundnuts and pigeonpea. Through diversified crop rotations, they have managed to control the parasitic weed striga (Striga asiatica L.), fungal diseases and damage from white grubs, the larvae of the black maize beetle (Phyllophaga ssp. and Heteronychus spp.). As an added advantage, they have improved family nutrition and have surplus produce to sell in local markets.
The use of conservation agriculture multiplies these benefits. Legumes such as groundnuts, cowpeas and soybeans can be grown on flat soil with half the row spacing, which is not possible under the conventional ridge and furrow system. The increased plant population has more than doubled grain yield, provides better ground cover and reduces soil erosion. The need to grow more food on the same land area has spurred innovation. To increase legume production, farmers have started to adopt the “double-up legume system.” Growing legumes with different growth habits side-byside – for example pigeon pea with cowpea or groundnuts – increases farmers’ yields and incomes even more, while also improving food security.
Lastly, drought-tolerant maize varieties provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa (DTMA) project were recently introduced and are being tested under different crop management systems. With the new stress-tolerant maize cultivars, farmers can now overcome seasonal dry spells and to grow longer season varieties. The risk of crop failure is reduced under conservation agriculture due to better moisture retention on residue-covered fields. This important benefit will be key in the coming years, as temperatures will likely increase and rainfalls become more erratic.
By Brenna Goth/CIMMYT
CIMMYT isn’t the only organization recognizing what would have been the 100th birthday of scientist and hunger fighter Dr. Norman E. Borlaug. There’s about one month to go until Dr. Borlaug’s birthday on 25 March but the celebrations will continue throughout the year.
We’ve mapped them out below, based on this list compiled by the World Food Prize.
View the interactive version here.
There’s still time to participate. CIMMYT is collecting stories and photos in advance of the Borlaug Summit on Wheat for Food Security in March while the World Food Prize is asking how you’ll help feed the world in honor of Dr. Borlaug. Submit your response here.
Follow #Borlaug100 on social media for the latest celebration news.
By Rajiv Sharma /CIMMYT
CIMMYT-Afghanistan organized a training event for staff from the Agricultural Research Institute of Afghanistan (ARIA) of the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock (MAIL) from 26-29 January in Kabul. Entitled “Experimental Design: Constitution, Analysis and Interpretation,” the event helped identify constraints to improving the quality of research and strengthen the capacity to integrate statistical procedures in research methodologies. Agricultural research deals with variability stemming from both controllable and uncontrollable sources.
Partitioning out the two and determining whether observed variation originates from real differences or are from chance is central to field experimentation. When Ram Sharma, cereal breeder for the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Area (ICARDA) and instructor of the event, asked participants what they expected to learn from the training, they responded that they were interested in how to design an experiment as well as how to interpret and write scientific reports. Sharma is also part of the CGIAR Program for Central Asia and Caucasus, Tashkent.
The event was attended by 35 participants from ARIA, the Department of Plant Protection and Quarantine (PPQD), the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), Joint Development Associates, MAIL, Kabul University and the MAIL Department of Irrigation. Sharma emphasized the importance of statistics in agricultural research as well as the use of replication, randomization and local control. Completely randomized designs (CRD) and factorial designs were also covered. Sharma explained that CRD can be used to analyze a farmer’s field after cultivation to determine in-field variance. He also taught the participants how to use crop statistic software and make a field book using computer programs. Example analyses showed attendees how to analyze their own data and interpret them. Qasem Obaidi, director of ARIA, closed the program and said it was helpful for the researchers and agronomists.
He thanked CIMMYT-Afghanistan, Sharma and CIMMYT’s Rajiv Kumar Sharma for their help. CIMMYT-Afghanistan also used the occasion to congratulate three of its staff members, Abdul Qayum, Shafi Ahmad and Mohammad Nasim, for completing 10 years of service to CIMMYT.
By Anuradha Dhar/CIMMYT
A new CIMMYT book, Made in Bangladesh: Scale-appropriate machinery for agricultural resource conservation, highlights the innovative machinery that can be used with two-wheeled tractors (2WT) for sustainable farming and gives detailed technical designs to help standardize production quality, making the machines more accessible to farmers.
Agricultural mechanization in South Asia is helping conserve natural resources, improve productivity and increase profits, but many small-scale farmers have yet to benefit. Factors such as high costs and farmers’ lack of access to credit make the machinery unaffordable for resource-poor farmers. However, Bangladesh leads by example and has been a hotbed of innovation, particularly with the 2WTs that are more appropriate for small-scale farmers than the four-wheel variety. Bangladesh has a strong agricultural tradition – nearly twothirds of its population works in agriculture. It has achieved near self-sufficiency in rice production and has rapidly developed its agricultural sector over the past 20 years, despite being ranked 146th on the global human development index and having roughly half the per capita income of India. Bangladesh’s agriculture sector contributes 19 percent to the country’s gross domestic product. This is the bright side.
The other side, however, is that farmers’ land-holdings are very small – an average farming household owns just 0.2 hectares or less – and Bangladesh is home to intensive cropping rotations. Every square centimeter of arable land is used 1.8 times a year, putting intense pressure on natural resources and making the system unsustainable in the long term. Farmers have to continually adapt to challenges including climate change, rising temperatures and increasing fuel prices to sustain productivity.
Many farmers are using innovative agricultural machinery to improve the precision and speed of planting and harvesting operations while reducing fuel, irrigation water and labor requirements. With the introduction of cheap, easy-to-operate and easy-to-maintain 2WTs, agriculture in Bangladesh has become highly mechanized during the last decade. Nearly 80 percent of farmers use 2WTs because they are versatile and can be fitted with a variety of innovative auxiliary equipment for planting, threshing and irrigation.
Made in Bangladesh highlights these innovations and includes reviews and designs of the machinery used with 2WTs for resource-conserving practices, including zero tillage and strip tillage seed and fertilizer drills, bed planters, axial flow irrigation pumps, strip tillage blades, improved furrow openers and seed metering mechanisms. Each chapter has scaled technical designs of the machinery, developed with computer-aided drafting to allow manufacturers in Bangladesh and beyond to reproduce and make improvements on the machines. “Many of the machines in the book are inspiring innovations,” said Timothy Krupnik, CIMMYT cropping systems agronomist and one of the book’s authors. “Bangladesh is often seen in a negative light – most international media focuses on its political tragedies, grinding poverty and pressing environmental concerns. But, if you live in Bangladesh, you get inspired every day by the creative ways that many of the world’s poorest people come up with creative solutions to the problems they face. All of the machines in the book were either designed and made in Bangladesh, or borrowed from other machines in South and Southeast Asia and then were manufactured in Bangladesh.”
The book’s technical designs can be easily replicated by machinery manufacturers, scientists or farmers. “The drawings were developed in a reverse engineering process, where I measured the machines manually and immediately sketched them on paper by hand,” said co-author Santiago Santos Valle. “Once back in the office, I produced the computer-aided drawings using the hand-made sketches.” Spending hours of work recreating these sketches on the computer, Santos Valle painstakingly created all the technical designs in the book.
A learning module on technical drawing interpretation and instructions on how to use the drawings have also been included. Standardization and Affordability There is a great need for small-scale farmers to adopt new machinery to overcome rural labor shortages in places like Bangladesh. “Wheat and maize yields decline between 1 and 1.5 percent per day when planted late, so you can imagine the effect if you use the machines to reduce tillage,” Krupnik explained. “Applying seed and fertilizer in one go can save seven to eight days that farmers would have otherwise spent plowing and preparing the land.” One of the most significant problems confronting mechanization in South Asia is design standardization. “Bangladesh has been a ‘hot bed’ of innovation, particularly for the two-wheel tractor,” said Andrew McDonald, CIMMYT cropping systems agronomist and co-author. “But much of this innovation has not reached farmers at scale because commercialization has been impeded by the lack of standardization. Essentially, most workshops create a unique machine every time a new piece is fabricated, which drives up costs to both manufacture and repair the machinery. Quality control is also an issue.”
He emphasized that CIMMYT is playing a catalytic role to ensure high-quality machinery is available at a reasonable cost in Bangladesh. The organization is helping formalize the design elements of innovative machinery and working with workshops and industrial houses to implement these designs. In the USAID-Bangladesh Mission funded project, Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia – Mechanization and Irrigation (CSISA-MI), CIMMYT works with the NGO International Development Enterprises (iDE) to develop and execute business models to encourage companies and agricultural manufacturers to produce and distribute the machines through commercial mechanisms.
In turn, agricultural service providers are linked to finance entities and farmers to purchase machines and to assure demand in the field. These efforts receive technical backing from CIMMYT scientists, who assure that land is planted with reduced tillage implements or irrigated with energy efficient pumps. As a result, the adoption of these machines has significantly increased in the last few months – the machinery is now being used on over 2,000 hectares of new land in southern Bangladesh alone – more than a four-fold increase compared to the year before.
The machines included in the book have wide applicability outside of Bangladesh, such as in smallholder farming contexts in Asia and Africa. “We want the work done in Bangladesh to inspire agricultural machinery manufacturers to reproduce and improve machines in other countries,” Krupnik said. “For this reason the book is free and available through open access and can be downloaded, printed and shared with others as widely as possible.” The PDF version of the book is available from the CIMMYT repository.
By Brenna Goth/CIMMYT
Food historian Rachel Laudan will explain wheat’s impact on world history at the Borlaug Summit on Wheat for Food Security. The Summit, which will be held in Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, Mexico, in March, will feature Laudan’s lecture “Wheat: The Grain at the Center of Civilization.”
Wheat, used in many of the most popular dishes across the globe, has changed the world, according to Laudan.
“No one would have predicted this of the hard-to-process seeds of this finicky, low- yielding grass,” she writes in a preview to her talk. “Nor would they have predicted that processing wheat would have encouraged new forms of economic organization, expressed political and social status and symbolized moral and religious beliefs.”
She recently released the book Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, a story of how food is interconnected with economies, beliefs, social structures and politics throughout time and across the world. The book is a finalist for the International Association of Culinary Professionals 2014 Food Writing Awards. Laudan describes her inspiration on her blog.
Here, Laudan has provided us with an excerpt of the book focused on the difficulties of grinding wheat:
When I was a little girl, my father decided to make some flour from the wheat we had grown on the farm. He tried pounding it with a pestle and mortar but all he got was broken grains, not flour. He put it through the hand mincer screwed to the edge of the table with the same result. Finally, he attacked it with a hammer on the flagstone floor. After he gave up, defeated, my mother cleared up the mess. It was sobering to realize that if the commercial millers vanished, we could have starved even with barns full of sacks of wheat.
To turn wheat into flour, you have to shear, not pound, the hard grains, which requires a grindstone, as the people of Lake Kinneret had discovered. A friend in Mexico, where hand grinding still goes on, showed me how it worked. She knelt at the upper end of a grindstone, called a metate – a saddle-shaped platform on three inverted pyramidal legs, hewn from a single piece of volcanic rock. She mounded a handful of barley, took the mano, a stone shaped like a squared-off rolling pin, in both hands with her thumbs facing back to nudge the grain into place, and, using the whole weight of her upper body, sheared the mano over the grain. After half a dozen passes, she had broken the grains, which now clustered at the bottom end of the metate. Carefully scraping them up with her fingertips, she moved them back to the top, and started shearing again, this time producing white streaks of flour. By the time she had sheared the grain from top to bottom five or six times, she had produced a handful of flour.
Grinding may look easy, and it is, for the first ten minutes. To grind a quantity of grain, though, as I found out when I tried, takes skill, control, physical strength, and time. I was quickly panting, sweaty, and dizzy, my hair in my eyes, and the mano slipping at awkward angles. Grinding is hard on the knees, hips, back, shoulders, and elbows, causing arthritis and bone damage. Grinding is lonely, too exhausting to allow for chatter. Kneeling to grind with the breasts swinging can be seen as submissive, demeaning, and sexually provocative, as lascivious eighteenth- and nineteenth-century illustrations of Mexican women grinding make clear. The heavy labor was relegated to women, convicts, and slaves, called “grinding slaves” in the technical language of seventh-century English court documents. Even today Mexican women in remote villages grind five hours daily to prepare enough maize for a family of five or six. For generation upon generation of grinders in the bread-eating parts of the world, the author of Genesis (3:19) had it nailed. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
You can purchase the book through the University of California Press or Amazon. For more thoughts from Rachel Laudan, check out her website and read her blog.
See all of the Summit speakers here.
By Peter Setimela/CIMMYT
CIMMYT Seed Systems Specialist Peter Setimela participated in the Global Forum for Innovations in Agriculture from 3-5 February in the United Arab Emirates. The theme of the conference was “driving innovation for an agricultural revolution.” More than 1,800 delegates and 120 exhibitors were hosted by Deputy Prime Minister Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF).
By Wandera Ojanji /CIMMYT
A government official in Malawi is urging extension officers and agro-dealers to promote metal silos and super grain bags to help reduce post-harvest grain losses, a serious problem and challenge for smallholder farmers.
Annual post-harvest losses of maize from insects and pests during storage in Malawi average 15.7 percent of the total maize harvests, an equivalent of 580,000 metric tons. It’s a quantity Godfrey Ching’oma, director of crop development for Malawi’s Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security (MAFS) feels is too high . He urged extension officers and agro-dealers to promote metal silos and super grain bags to help farmers lower these post-harvest losses. “It is our vision that at least half of the farmers in Malawi have access to either metal silos or super grain bags,” Ching’oma said. “Lowering post-harvest losses can only be realized if we work together toward a common goal.
By K.C. Dilli /CIMMYT
The Hill Maize Research project (HMRP) commends the commitment, dedication and service of Guillermo Ortiz-Ferrara, who retired on 31 January after leading the project for nearly nine years.
By AbduRahman Beshir/CIMMYT
Partners with the Agricultural Innovation Program for Pakistan (AIP) are working to enhance availability and access to maize seeds and varieties. The AIP maize working group discussed problems and shared recommendations to help improve maize production and productivity during its inception meeting from 3-4 February in Islamabad.
Dr. Iftikhar Ahmad, chairman of PARC, leads a group discussion. On his left is Shahid Masood, a member of the plant sciences division of PARC. On his right are Michael Wyzan, USAID representative, and Imtiaz Muhammad, AIP interim project leader and CIMMYT country representative.Maize follows wheat and rice as Pakistan’s third most important cereal crop and is first in productivity. Covering 1.14 million hectares with a national average grain yield of about 4.0 tons per hectare (t/ha), maize area, production and productivity increased by 14.5 percent, 26 percent and 13.6 percent, respectively, from 2010-11 to 2013, according to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. The high demand for feed and food are the main forces driving the increased production of maize in Pakistan. Punjab and KPK provinces are the leaders in maize production. Most maize production receives irrigation, and the majority of maize farmers produce the crop in rotation with wheat and rice.
By Brenna Goth/CIMMYT
What do you know about wheat?
The crop is the focus of the Borlaug Summit on Wheat for Food Security, an event CIMMYT is hosting in March to celebrate what would have been the 100th birthday of Dr. Norman Borlaug. Topics of the summit range from the history of wheat, to the work of Dr. Borlaug, to climate change and world grain policy.
Here are a few things you might not know about wheat and wheat research. Take a look and then test your knowledge by taking our wheat quiz!
By Brenna Goth/CIMMYT
A partnership launched on 3 February by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Feed the Future Partnering for Innovation and led by the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) will help CIMMYT and other partners to fight a parasitic plant affecting maize production.
The three-year, performancebased grant of US$ 3 million is the largest grant awarded by Feed the Future Partnering for Innovation to date, according to an AATF press release. Feed the Future Partnering for Innovation supports projects increasing the productivity of smallholder farmers while AATF promotes sustainable agricultural technology for smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The funding will help improve maize production in east Africa by “upscaling the commercialization of StrigAwayTM – an herbicidetolerant seed and treatment that controls the infestation of Striga – a parasitic weed that often results in total crop loss and even abandonment of arable land,” the press release said. Striga – commonly known as witchweed – can cause 20 to 80 percent crop loss in maize and affects 1.4 million hectares in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, according to the release.
CIMMYT helped develop the StrigAwayTM technology package along with partners including the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. An herbicide-tolerant maize variety is coated with an herbicide that kills Striga when the seed is sown and sprouts.
Other partners, including the agrochemical company BASF and six local seed companies, will promote the project in the three target countries. The project aims to create 4,000 demonstration plots and sell 1,000 metric tons of seed to 20,000 smallholder farmers. Partners will also offer technical support on how to use the seed and launch campaigns and promotion of StrigAwayTM.