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 4 no. 7, July 2007

Infrared sensors help better target fertilizer for wheat on large commercial farms in northern Mexico, cutting production costs and reducing nitrogen run-off into coastal seas.

Farmers of the Yaqui Valley, Sonora State, northern Mexico, and fish in the Sea of Cortez: what ties could they possibly share? Well, if CIMMYT wheat agronomist Iván Ortíz-Monasterio and fellow researchers at Stanford University and Oklahoma State University achieve their aims, both farmers and fish may breathe a little easier.

Ortíz-Monasterio and his partners have been testing and promoting with Yaqui Valley farmers a sensor that measures light reflected from wheat leaves and thereby gauges the health and likely yield of the plants. The device is calibrated to capture red wavelengths, which indicate chlorophyll content, and infrared wavelengths, a measure of biomass. The readings are run through a mathematical model to provide a recommendation about whether or not the crop requires a mid-season application of fertilizer.

Yaqui Valley wheat farmers work large holdings (averaging around 100 hectares), use irrigation and mechanization, and grow improved varieties with fertilizer, fungicides, and other inputs. They typically get excellent yields—on the order of 6 tons per hectare. Despite this, they are feeling squeezed by the rising costs of diesel fuel, water, fertilizer, and other inputs, and many are actually in debt; so they are fervently seeking ways to save money.

Too much of a good thing?

“Farmers here typically apply 230 kilograms of nitrogen per hectare, and 150 kilograms of this goes on 20 days before sowing,” explains Arturo Muñoz Cañez, a consulting agronomist who works a lot of the time with the Asociación de Organismos de Agricultores del Sur de Sonora, an umbrella group that includes seven farmer credit unions serving producers on some 140,000 hectares in the region. “Our studies with Iván have shown that local wheat crops actually use only about one-third of that fertilizer.”

Where does the rest go? Some evaporates into the atmosphere, in the form of nitrous oxide, a notorious greenhouse gas that is nearly 300 times more damaging than carbon dioxide. Another part leaches as nitrate into groundwater, and much of the rest dissolves in run-off irrigation and rainwater, eventually finding its way to the west coast of Sonora and into the sea. There it may fertilize oxygen-hungry algae that can suffocate other marine life and cut into fishermen’s catches.

From Mexico to the world

With the help of Ortíz-Monasterio, Muñoz, and other agronomists, Yaqui Valley farmers used the sensor on 174 plots in 2006-07, comparing readings from a fully-fertilized comparison strip with those from the rest of the field at 45 days after sowing—a point at which most important differences in crop development are evident. They then followed the resulting recommendations concerning how much additional fertilizer was needed, if any. In 66% of the cases, the recommendation was to apply nothing more. At harvest, yields from both the fully-fertilized strips and 86 test plots were compared by weighing the grain. “92% of the farmers got good yields—that is, comparable to those of fully-fertilized strips—and on average saved around US$ 75 per hectare in fertilizer they did not apply,” says Muñoz. That’s a US$ 7,500 savings for a 100-hectare farm.

Ortíz-Monasterio attributes the success partly to residual fertility in the local soils, but would like to see eventual adoption of more precise, resource-conserving agricultural practices—including direct seeding without tillage, retaining crop residues on the soil surface, and improved water use efficiency—on at least half of the total 200,000 hectares of the Yaqui and nearby Mayo Valleys. “The Yaqui Valley has been a sort of laboratory for the rest of the world,” says Ortíz-Monasterio, who has worked for several years with researchers in Pakistan to adapt the sensor for the country’s extensive irrigated wheat lands. “A lot of what was first developed here—high-yielding wheat varieties, sowing on raised beds, and now the sensor—has gone on to be used in other wheat farming regions of the developing world. In some ways, what happens here is a reflection of how successful or not CIMMYT is.”

Ortíz-Monasterio is also promoting a lower-cost alternative for farmers who may not be able to work with a sensor: “You simply establish a well-fertilized strip in your field. If the rest of your crop looks comparable in health and development to plants in the strip, then you don’t need to apply more fertilizer. If there is any difference, then you apply what you would normally apply. In this way, we’d help at least half the irrigated wheat farmers in the world.”

For more information: Iván Ortíz-Monasterio, wheat agronomist (i.ortiz-monasterio@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.

In a determined effort to shield consumers against food price volatility, the government of Ecuador has renewed its investment in food crop research, including a vigorous program to restore wheat production and reduce the nation’s perilous dependence on imported grain.

The mild irony of putting on a festival to release a drought-tolerant wheat variety after days of unseasonably rainy weather was not lost on Esteban Falconí and Jorge Coronel of Ecuador’s National Institute of Agricultural Research (INIAP). They could not have imagined a more fitting demonstration of the “crazy climate” that has emerged in recent years, altering the long-established weather patterns that govern the cropping season.

In the days before the variety launch, held on 15 July in the Saraguro area of Loja Province, Falconí, who leads INIAP’s cereals program, and Coronel, who heads up the program’s work in southern Ecuador, worried about the bad weather’s real and immediate consequences. Occurring at harvest time (which should have been accompanied by clear skies and intense heat), it threatened to spoil the grain in experimental plots and wreak havoc on farmers’ harvests of wheat, barley, and other crops. The rain also posed a hazard to INIAP’s carefully orchestrated release event.

As luck would have it, the morning of the event, the rains ceased and the harsh Andean sun shown brightly, not only reducing the risk of crop damage but also ensuring that researchers, farmers, political leaders, and other invitees could fittingly celebrate the official arrival of the new wheat, INIAP Vivar 2010 (named after scientist Hugo Vivar). It is among the first products of a campaign launched in 2008 to renew Ecuador’s diminished wheat production.

A posthumous tribute Deviating just this once from their custom of naming wheat varieties after Ecuador’s highest mountains, researchers dubbed their latest release ‘INIAP Vivar 2010’ in honor of the late Hugo Vivar. He worked as a barley breeder for 16 years with the International Center for Agriculture in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), which posted him at CIMMYT to serve the Latin American region. Subsequently, CIMMYT employed Vivar for another 9 years. A native of Ecuador’s Loja Province, Vivar spent brief periods during his childhood at the family farm in Saraguro. One of the farmers attending an event held to release the new wheat variety recalled that her mother had been one of his playmates. As a scientist, Vivar returned to Saraguro often, helping design a long-term project in collaboration with INIAP, which confronted with remarkable success problems that have kept agricultural productivity low and rural poverty high in this remote mountainous region.

Having tested Vivar for several years in their own plots, farmers attending the event knew that it would bring higher yields of good-quality grain and offer a buffer against increasingly common drought, another sign of the crazy new climate.

A hole in the food basket
Planted in small plots on steep mountain slopes, Saraguro’s wheat and barley crops appear in the distance like yellow stamps stuck on huge crumpled sheets of green and brown paper.

Against that backdrop, INIAP’s release event celebrated both a new agricultural technology and southern Ecuador’s vibrant rural life. Speeches, displays, and an outdoor banquet drew attention to the new wheat as well as to the region’s rich popular culture, passionate politics, deep religious faith and hard-working people.

Despite the event’s local flavor, it had far-reaching repercussions, including creating public awareness (partly through mass media coverage) of a new technology that represents concrete and rapid progress in an ambitious plan to revive Ecuador’s wheat production.

The plan forms part of this country’s decisive response to the global food price crisis of 2008. Across the developing world, the crisis showed how quickly food security can deteriorate, aggravating the plight of millions of poor and reflecting fundamental weaknesses in the global food system which had been overlooked for years.

In Ecuador, the crisis revealed one gaping hole in an otherwise sturdy basket of staple foods. The country is self-sufficient in rice and produces abundant supplies of beans, cassava, maize, and potatoes. However, Ecuador imports nearly all of its wheat for bread, which figures importantly in the diets of rural and urban consumers alike.

“When wheat prices spiked in 2008, Ecuador’s government cushioned the blow by temporarily subsidizing imported wheat at great cost,” explains Julio César Delgado, INIAP’s director general. Well aware of the flaws in such a policy, he says, government policy makers, at the prompting of president Rafael Correa, sought INIAP’s help in formulating a plan to revitalize wheat production and reduce the country’s excessive dependence on the international wheat market.

Resilient wheat for a rugged environment

INIAP itself had suggested such action many times before, but the message had always fallen on deaf ears. Shaken by the 2008 food crisis, the government took the initiative this time, setting out realistic goals and providing about USD 4.3 million over 5 years for intensified wheat research and promotion.

The central aim of the new initiative is to expand Ecuador’s wheat area to about 50,000 hectares, enough to satisfy at least 30% of domestic demand. That would be up from just 3% currently covered by local production. This assumes that farmers will adopt new varieties and apply adequate quantities of fertilizer, for which they will receive credit on reasonable terms.

“A major challenge will be to produce and provide enough improved seed,” says Walter Larriva, director of an INIAP experiment station near the city of Cuenca. The new funding will help, and so will INIAP’s years of experience in helping establish farmer seed production groups, he explains.

Less than two years after the 2008 decision to renew Ecuador’s wheat research and production, INIAP is already releasing improved varieties, including Vivar for southern Ecuador and San Jacinto (released later in July, along with a new barley variety) for the country’s central and northern zones. Those are the first wheat varieties to be released in Ecuador since the early 1990s, when Cojitambo became available. Much of the country’s limited wheat area is planted to that and older varieties.

Vivar is far more resilient than its predecessors under rugged conditions, offering a consistent yield advantage of about 80%. Based on a line developed by CIMMYT and named Berkut, it was introduced into Ecuador during 2003. Vivar’s good tolerance to drought probably comes from a line in its pedigree that resulted from crosses made at CIMMYT between domesticated wheat and related wild species. The excellent performance of the new variety bodes well for INIAP’s initiative to reduce Ecuador’s dependence on imported wheat, but it could generate further benefits as well.

One of the farmers present at the release, Patricio Ordóñez, describes how he invested extra income from improved wheat in the production of high-value tropical fruits. Ordóñez is one of more than a dozen community leaders trained under a project carried out jointly by INIAP and CIMMYT in Saraguro from 1995 to 2008, with the aim of reducing rural poverty through more diverse and sustainable agricultural systems.

A renaissance of research results
INIAP was able to release Vivar and San Jacinto so soon after the start of the new national wheat initiative for two reasons. One was CIMMYT’s unswerving support for local wheat research even during its time of relative dormancy in Ecuador. If that service had ceased, INIAP’s new wheat team would have been forced to start essentially from scratch, adding many years to the process of variety development.

Just as important was the government’s decision in the wake of the food crisis to thoroughly refurbish INIAP’s research infrastructure as well as to hire and train dozens more scientists and technicians.

“Many years of neglect,” says Delgado, “had left our facilities in a poor state and had undermined the ability and motivation of our scientists to deliver results.” As director general, Delgado’s main achievement was to restore what he refers to as “la mística del trabajo” (or work ethic), leading to a renaissance of research results, as demonstrated by Vivar and other new varieties.

Segundo Ceballos, who worked in INIAP’s barley and wheat plots for more than four decades, is very happy about the new varieties and the wheat research revival. For they vindicate years of struggle to keep a central pillar of his country’s food security from falling.

For further information: Hans Braun, director, global wheat program (h.braun@cgiar.org)