May, 2004

Drought, arguably the greatest threat to food production worldwide, was the focal point of a high-level, weeklong workshop supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and CIMMYT, commencing May 24, in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Approximately 140 scientists from Asia, Africa, and Latin America–working on various aspects of drought tolerance in plants–met to present their research results and discuss ways forward with their colleagues. The meeting, entitled the “Resilient Crops for Water-Limited Environments workshop,” looked mainly at maize, rice, and wheat, which account for more than half of the calories consumed by people in the developing world, and are the basis for their food security and livelihoods. Scientists comprehensively addressed drought, looking at drought tolerance from the ground-level perspective of incorporating farmer participation into varietal development, to the heights of molecular genetics, and how plant genes interact and respond to water stress.

The workshop was opened by Dr. Gordon Conway, President, The Rockefeller Foundation, and Dr. Masa Iwanaga, Director General of CIMMYT.

Dr. Conway, in his address, declared a “war on drought.” He explained that 70% of the one billion African and Asians in extreme poverty (less than $1/day) live in rural areas, and that agriculture is their primary route to improved nutrition and income. For developing world farmers, drought wreaks havoc, forcing them to sell off their meager assets, such as livestock or their own off-farm labor, and forego health care and their children’s education. Often the results are far more dire: hunger, malnutrition, and even starvation. In the 1960s and 70s, the Green Revolution saved hundreds of millions from famine, said Conway, but many living in less favored environments were bypassed as much of the success was based on adequate water and soil fertility. What is needed now is a Doubly Green Revolution to lift up the African and Asian smallholders left behind. Drought tolerant crops are key to this cause .

Dr. Iwanaga recounted the long and close relationship between CIMMYT and The Rockefeller Foundation, dating back to the pre-CIMMYT era and the Foundation’s support for Norman Borlaug’s work on semi-dwarf cereals, leading to the Green Revolution. That success led to the birth of CIMMYT and the CGIAR, with considerable backing again provided by the Foundation.

Even today, Dr. Iwanaga pointed out, the Foundation remains one of CIMMYT’s most important supporters, both financially, but more importantly, in the confluence of the Foundation’s goals and CIMMYT’s research activities. Both institutions see drought tolerant crops, soil fertility, and the development of seed markets and distribution systems as essential pillars for improving productivity for smallholder farmers, thereby providing a path out of poverty to better livelihoods for the developing world’s rural poor.

Extended abstracts from the workshop are forthcoming and will be made available to the public before year’s end.

November, 2004

How could a wheat research station in the middle of a maize-growing state become a resource for its neighbors? Campaigning for conservation agriculture and maize hybrids, CIMMYT’s Toluca Station superintendent Fernando Delgado Ramos is changing the way some farmers think about the plow. What started out as a crop rotation for a wheat experiment is now turning heads for its advances in maize yields.

Julián Martínez is one of the farmers to have noticed. He has seen tremendous differences in his efforts since adopting hybrid maize seeds and direct seeding methods on raised soil beds, which he started two years ago. Early in the season he was ashamed of his crop, but now smiles with pride when people pass on the nearby road, touching the tip of his hat and grinning. His results last year planting hybrids directly into raised soil beds were so abundant that the landowner increased the rent, which compelled Martínez to shift his efforts to a nearby ejido, or communal land. Small as the area may be, another bumper crop came this year, with not a bit of lodging in his straight and strong stocks of maize. Well-protected, fuller husks are another benefit of the particular hybrid Martínez has chosen. Driving through Toluca, located in a mountain valley, it’s obvious that lodging is a prevalent problem here. Even when leaning maize stocks were no longer Martínez’s problem and his yield doubled to eight tons per hectare, many local farmers have not taken the practices he and Delgado espouse seriously.

“My father thought I was crazy when I started,” Martínez says. “‘What are you doing with this?!’ he asked me. He thought I wasn’t being a good farmer, that I was doing bad work,” Martínez admits, and explains that at first he wasn’t allowed to rent his father’s three hectares. In May and June, when early-maturing local varieties dwarfed his late-maturing hybrids, he was worried, “but not anymore,” he says. By the end of the 2003 harvest, his father and brother were convinced. Martínez’s mentor throughout this process, Delgado sees these experiences as valuable because “if one farmer takes up the technology, I am happy, and the idea will spread itself.” Next year he anticipates helping two farmers in Jalisco convert over 250 hectares to permanent soil beds. Big strides for an idea that has started out small.

An Off-station Sideline Brings Local Benefits

Delgado is a leader among an array of seasoned and experienced field workers at Toluca Station, many who have been working there for over 20 years. Their combined experience and constancy have been enormously beneficial to Toluca’s success developing wheat for acidic soil and high rainfall environments. It has only been in the last few years that Delgado has made progress helping the maize farmers around the station, something he accomplishes as a sort of sideline after completing a full day of balancing office and fieldwork. Farmers gravitate to this tall Mexican, who knows his stuff after working at CIMMYT for 14 years. Educated in agronomy, he started out in a joint program between the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas and CIMMYT, providing Latin America with improved barley strains, and now he has risen to superintendent at Toluca.

After exhausting other sources of information and assistance, it is the serious farmers, bent on improving their harvests, who flock to Delgado. Most Toluca Valley farmers do not fully depend on agriculture; rather, they supplement their day jobs with these side ventures. The ambitious ones want to improve their yields, but most just sow to fill the land and hope for a moderate harvest. Still, each year about 600 farmers attend presentations led by Delgado on conservation agriculture. Although their established methods do not allow them to thrive, local farmers are reluctant to change, he explains. “I put their hand to the land and show them. It’s not impossible to change their minds.”

Putting Aside the Plow

But it is intensive work, conversing, going through all options and strategies of this new idea, sometimes for five hours at a time. The “culture of the plow” is ingrained in Mexican life, and to uproot it is hard work. This is why Delgado works with children as well, going to schools and introducing his ideas. “To change the culture is to put conservation agriculture into the minds of children,” he says, “It is beautiful to explain to children, for they appreciate how they eat, and what they eat.”

Delgado’s movement toward conservation agriculture started as a way to save money in operations at the Toluca Station through use of less water, fuel, and machinery passes. Fifty percent of the station’s land is used for wheat experiments, and the other half is devoted to crop rotations to sustain the land. It was in this section that Delgado started using direct seeding methods on raised beds to rescue money for other projects. After a couple of harvests, 10 tons of grain was recovered per hectare, compared to an average of 5–8 before. Conservation agriculture had captured his attention.

It is obvious that the planet has been disturbed by human existence, and conservation agriculture is “a little bit to support the world,” Delgado says. He feels very passionately about this, his words coming slowly and deliberately. “Conservation agriculture is the future,” he affirms, “It is common sense, it is how we help the environment.” Its goals include preservation, improvement and more efficient use of resources such as soil, water, and fuel for machinery. As well as the environmental benefits, conservation agriculture makes farming more sustainable with better yields. To realize these goals, a permanent soil cover must be allowed to develop, which makes plowing obsolete. This is the detail farmers find most difficult to swallow, because tilling the land is the way they and their parents have survived. They assume that not using a plow to turn the soil allows weeds to overrun a field, and find the idea of planting seeds into a field with last year’s stubble untidy. But using conservation agriculture with well-timed herbicides and proper crop rotations can actually improve yields.

“People visit the station, and the farmers want to be better than CIMMYT,” Delgado laughs. A friendly rivalry has grown out of Toluca’s success, and now the farmers want to better their own yields to exceed the research station’s results. He thinks this is “nice, because the healthy competition has transformed the farmers to better their techniques. A little revolution in Toluca, but a big change in the farmer’s mind. Farmer to farmer to farmer.” he says. The same people who, a few years ago, were saying how crazy the innovative farmers were, are now asking how they can try the new technology.

Adaptation, to make fit by modification, not adoption, is suggested for the farmers to make a seamless transition to conservation agriculture. Rather than purchasing all new equipment to replace what they already have, Delgado promotes the adjustment of their current machinery. “For the small farmer, to spend USD 1,800 on a new machine is not an option. But to insert a piece that can be bought for half that is practical, and they can afford it.” Delgado says. This enables the small- and medium-sized farmers like Julián Martínez to start off in conservation agriculture. CIMMYT wheat agronomist Ken Sayre applauds Delgado’s efforts. “People like Fernando still believe that improving the crop production situation directly in farmers’ fields is the most valuable way to achieve impact,” he says. His practical initiatives are certainly helping many farmers to increase their productivity and profitability.

CIMMYT E-News, vol 3 no. 12, December 2006

Wheat lines that resisted virulent stem rust last season have now succumbed.

Observations from wheat rust screening trials in Kenya indicate even more of the world’s wheat is at risk from a stem rust attack than originally thought. Scientists from CIMMYT and its partners, studying wheat planted at the Njoro Agriculture Research Centre, report that more than 85% of sample wheats, including cultivars from the major wheat producing regions of the world, have succumbed to the stem rust known as Ug99. Most importantly some wheat lines which showed resistance to Ug99 stem rust a year ago now appear to be susceptible to the disease.

In August, 2005 an expert panel raised the first alarm about the new, virulent form of stem rust that could devastate world wheat crops. These new observations could mean the threat to the global wheat harvest is now significantly greater.

The Njoro Research Centre is in an area of Kenya where the virulent form of stem rust fungus is endemic. For the past three years scientists have used the station to expose wheat to the disease to see which is susceptible and most importantly, which is not. In March of 2006 more than 11000 different types of wheat and relatives of wheat from all over the world were planted and exposed to the fungus.

Studies are still underway to clarify the situation but it appears that at least one of the major stem rust resistance genes that has protected many of the world’s wheats for decades is no longer effective against the rust fungus at Njoro. This new development enhances the significance of what is already recognized as a dangerous threat to future global wheat harvests.

Wheat grows on more than 200 million hectares in both the developed and the developing world and the new data indicate that very little of that area is planted to varieties which resist the stem rust found at Njoro. Though stem rust may not be able to thrive in all parts of the world, scientists estimate that well over half of the total wheat area could suffer rust epidemics if susceptible varieties planted there are exposed to the pathogen.

“I was shocked at what I saw this season,” says Rick Ward, coordinator of the CIMMYT-ICARDA led Global Rust Initiative. “Essentially we have to find a way to replace all of the world’s wheat.”

Stem rust is one of the most dreaded of all plant diseases. In the mid-1950s it wiped out up to 40% of the North American spring wheat crop. Thanks in large part to the wheat breeding work of Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Dr. Norman Borlaug and those who followed him, the disease has not been a significant threat for almost half a century. Breeders combined several sources of resistance to the fungus into new varieties of wheat. Unfortunately, over time, the rust pathogen evolved and mutated and in 1999 scientists found a strain in Uganda (Ug99) that could bypass much of that resistance. The spores of the Ug99 fungus can travel great distances on the wind. The pathogen has already spread from Uganda into Kenya and Ethiopia. An outbreak of yellow rust originated in the same region of eastern Africa and eventually spread across the Arabian Peninsula and into the major wheat-growing areas of India and Pakistan. Studies of wind patterns in the region have led scientists to conclude that the new pathogen will eventually threaten wheat crops on a global scale.

CIMMYT and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), together with partners such as the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) are leading a global effort to characterize the rust pathogen; to track its spread and to find new sources of resistance to the disease and breed them into new wheats. This is especially important to farmers in the developing world who have little access to fungicides that could help reduce the damage.

“The good news is that some samples at Njoro did resist the fungus,” says CIMMYT wheat scientist, Ravi Singh. “That has given us a good place to start.” In fact Njoro is also the site where potential resistant breeding lines are now undergoing test.

For more information, Rick Ward (r.w.ward@cgiar.org)

CIMMYT E-News, vol 2 no. 10, October 2005

A new study from the Carnegie Institute of Washington, Stanford University, and CIMMYT shows wheat yield gains in northern Mexico could be due mostly to the weather.

Since the beginning of the Green Revolution in the 1960s Mexico has seen a continuing rise in average wheat yields. At the end of the 20th century yields were 25 percent higher than they were in 1980. It started with the improved wheat that Dr. Norman Borlaug developed during the 1940s and 50s in the Yaqui Valley of Mexico’s Sonora State.

CIMMYT scientists and partners have tracked yield trends in the area for decades, noting changes in varieties, cropping practices, disease pressures, and even policy changes that might have an impact on the final tonnage a farmer gets from the field. Trends observed here, in the cradle of the Green Revolution, may be good indicators for other parts of the wheat producing world.

CIMMYT agronomist Dr. Ivan Ortiz-Monasterio and his colleagues from Stanford University were curious to evaluate the most significant factors in that yield gain. But before they could look at the contribution of fertilizers or improved varieties, they decided to eliminate any impact that changes in climate might have had. This is no easy task, and often in calculations in the past, the weather was assumed to have been relatively constant and therefore would not affect a trend in yield.

By taking climate into account, the team came up with a surprising result, one that has long-term implications in a world where global warming is likely a major part of ongoing climate change.

Taking detailed weather data from 1987 – 2002 recorded at two weather stations close to farms whose output of wheat per hectare was well documented, they used a computer model for how wheat grows to simulate what would happen to wheat yields using the real weather data and leaving every other potential impact constant. The result was that from 85-100% of all the change in wheat yield could be explained by the climate.

“Basically a two-degree change in temperature accounted for nearly all of the yield change,” says the Carnegie Institute’s Dr David Lobell, the principal author of the study.

The study found that the nighttime temperature had the most significant impact on wheat yield. The weather data showed that over the 15-year period there had been a gradual trend toward cooler nights. During that time, farm yields in the areas studied in the Yaqui and Mayo Valleys (Sonora State) and in the San Luis and Rio Colorado Valleys (Baja California) increased from below 5 tons / hectare to about 6 tons / hectare, a significant increase.

“Although higher yielding wheat varieties were developed during the 15 years of the study, these were not widely grown by farmers in the region,” says Dr. Ortiz-Monasterio. “This was due to the breakdown of disease resistance or bread making quality limitations.”

Not satisfied with a result based on a single computer model, the team decided to try a second approach to get at the impact of temperatures on production. Again, the independent analysis produced very similar results.

The new study, published in the current issue of Field Crops Research and supported by the National Science Foundation and the Packard Foundation, has important implications for directions in wheat research. Climate changes, in particular increases in average temperatures, could have important, negative effects on wheat yields in the future.

For further information, contact Ivan Ortiz-Monasterio (i.ortiz-monasterio@cgiar.org).

May, 2004

In the next 25 years, a very large share of the additional wheat needed to feed the rising population in developing countries will come from intensive farming systems. It is more important than ever to learn how to reduce the impact of intensive agriculture on the environment while ensuring that those systems can supply much-needed food in the years to come.

One such system is the Yaqui Valley in northwestern Mexico, site of CIMMYT’s main wheat research station. “Because of its location—between the ocean and a mountain range—the Valley serves as an ideal laboratory for investigating the long-term effects of intensive farming on neighboring ecosystems,” comments David Lobell, a Stanford University researcher collaborating with CIMMYT. “These effects have regional implications—for example, for the Sea of Cortes and adjacent ecosystems—as well as global consequences, since they contribute to global warming and, ultimately, climate change.”

Remote sensing by NASA satellites, started in 1999 as part of the CIMMYT/Stanford University collaborative study, is a new way of studying farming activities in the Valley. Forty percent of the wheat produced in the developing world comes from irrigated environments resembling the environment in the Valley. Because of this similarity, investigations conducted in the Valley have applications far beyond it, particularly in the intensive production systems of South Asia, which feed billions of people.

The Latest Applications of Remote Sensing in the Valley

The Yaqui Valley can be thought of as a large experimental field, made up of individual farmers’ fields. These farmers can be divided into three groups. Some plant wheat too early, others plant it on time, and others plant it too late. During each cropping cycle, researchers use remote sensing to make thousands of observations across the whole Valley and determine how different sowing dates affect wheat yields. This procedure is more effective than establishing a trial specifically to test the effects of different planting dates at a research station.

Based on the resulting information, CIMMYT researchers have calculated that in bad years, when temperatures are high and water is scarce, late planting causes yield losses worth about US$ 10 million in the Valley. “This information comes just in time for wheat farmers, who can adjust their sowing dates and cope better with the intense drought we’ve had in the Valley for the past eight years,” says Ortiz-Monasterio.

In good years, when there is enough water and cool temperatures, the effect of late sowing on wheat yields is either negligible or nil. Nonetheless, data on when most farmers sow their wheat are potentially useful to decision makers, who, based on these data, could ensure that credit and irrigation water are available to producers when they are ready to plant.

Remote sensing is also being used for tracking nitrogen derivatives that are released into the atmosphere or leached into the soil with irrigation water. Currently several Stanford professors are leading teams that study the effect of irrigation water that flows from the Yaqui Valley into the Sea of Cortes, about 20 km away. They are observing the increases in the algae bloom and/or the plankton in the Sea, and so far the increases seem to coincide with the outflow of irrigation water from the Valley. If this finding is confirmed, recommendations need to be made to Valley farmers that would allow them to reduce their nitrogen fertilizer applications.

In years past, CIMMYT wheat agronomists have worked out strategies that could dramatically reduce the amount of fertilizer applied to wheat without affecting yields. For example, farmers could reduce nitrogen applications by more than 30% if they apply less fertilizer exactly at the time when the crop starts pulling nitrogen from the soil. Currently farmers apply nitrogen with irrigation water, weeks before wheat is actually sown. This practice causes nearly 35% of the nitrogen to be lost through gas emissions and leaching before the crop is even in the ground.

Sensing Plants’ Nutrient Needs

Another way of fine-tuning fertilizer applications is to use an electronic sensor that is held over the wheat crop by a technician walking through the field. The sensor detects which plants need fertilizer and allows farmers to apply the exact amount of nitrogen at the right time, thereby reducing waste and farmers’ production costs. But, most importantly, this practice would reduce the amount of unused nitrogen that leaches through the soil and into the Sea of Cortes with the outflow of irrigation water. “Because individual farmers cannot afford to have their own sensors, we envision that district representatives in the Valley could offer this detection service to farmers districts every crop cycle,” comments Ortiz-Monasterio.

For more information, contact Ivan Ortiz-Monasterio.