Paul Mapfumo, member of the global conservation agriculture program and coordinator of SOFECSA—the Soil Fertility Consortium for Southern Africa—has been awarded a full professorship at the University of Zimbabwe in Harare as of March 2012, with the details of his continued relationship with CIMMYT to be worked out. Having opened its doors in 1952, the University is the oldest and largest university in Zimbabwe and has 10 faculties, including agriculture, as well as specialist research centers. “The SOFECSA work in CIMMYT—so much appreciated by communities and partners in Zimbabwe—was a major driver for this achievement,” said Mapfumo. “So thanks to CIMMYT and all our great partners.” SOFECSA is an inter-institutional and interdisciplinary consortium to undertake field- level adaptive research and development activities that enhance the impacts of integrated soil fertility management technologies on food security and farm incomes in Southern Africa and beyond.

Days #2 and 3 of CIMMYT Visitors Week, Ciudad Obregon, Sonora, Mexico

Many people perceive that wheat is a food eaten only by the rich; but they are wrong, argues Hans Braun, Head of CIMMYT’s Global Wheat Program. Addressing the group of scientists, farmers, politicians, and policymakers, in the INIFAP auditorium at CENEB, Ciudad Obregon, Braun presented some dramatic figures, illustrating just how many of the world’s poor are dependent on this staple crop.

Wheat is the main staple for approximately 1.2 billion poor people (living on less than 2 USD per day); providing 20% of the daily calories and 20% of the protein for people in the least developed countries. Rural migration in sub-Saharan Africa is causing the demand for wheat to increase faster than any other commodity – it is the basis of many of the ‘fast foods’ preferred by men who have left their families behind to earn money in the city.

Perhaps what is most concerning are the predictions for the near future. South Asia, where wheat is the second most important crop after rice, and where 74% of people live in poverty, will soon be home to 25% of the world’s population. If you look at a map showing the sites of recent food riots, it is almost identical to a map that shows countries where wheat provides more than one third of a person’s daily calories. The extreme heat wave and subsequent fires that led Russia to close it’s borders to wheat exports caused a dramatic rise in food prices and sparked riots across the region. “If food prices rise, governments fall,” stated Braun, and with climate change predicted to cause more extreme weather events such as those seen in Russia, CIMMYT’s wheat program is working to develop new varieties of drought-, heat-, and pathogen-resistant wheat.

On Day Two of Visitors Week, we visited Roberto Encinas, who is not a rich man at all. He farms 12 hectares of wheat just outside of Ciudad Obregon, 2 of which are now farmed under conservation agriculture (CA) practices. In fact, one of the reasons Encinas started to adopt CA was to reduce his costs, and so far he estimates that his CA crop has cost 200 USD less per hectare. Not only that, his crop his healthier. “I could see a difference right from the start,” says Encinas, “the CA crop is greener and has developed more slowly.” His technician says that whereas the conventional crop will probably produce 5tons/ha, the CA crop should produce 7tons/ha. “I am very convinced that CA is working and I will extend next year,” stated Encinas. Together with his farmer group, next year they hope to plant 50% of their 200ha total land under CA, with the support and guidance of CIMMYT-trained technicians.

The BISA facilities at Pusa, India, received a welcome guest on 17 March 2012, when Bihar Cabinet Minister, Giriraj Singh, visited to participate in a farm festival organized by the regional station of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI). Accompanied by CIMMYT researchers Raj Gupta, Ajai Kumar, and Raj Kumar, Singh visited wheat varietal and long-term conservation agriculture (CA) trials, and even took made some observations himself on penetration resistance (soil compaction) in eight CA plots.

A training course was held at the Agricultural Research Trust (ART), in Harare, Zimbabwe during 12-15 March 2012. Organized by CIMMYT-Zimbabwe, the course aimed to improve the skills and knowledge of maize technicians regarding implementing on-station and on-farm trials, seed production, and the use of secondary traits in selecting superior genotypes under low N and drought trials.

Participants represented five Zimbabwean seed companies and national agricultural research systems in Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and Swaziland, and were sponsored by CIMMYT’s New Seed Initiative for Maize in Southern Africa (NSIMA) and Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa (DTMA) projects, and FAO-Swaziland. Training included practical sessions as well as theoretical lectures on seed production and breeding for biotic and abiotic stresses. Participant Lazarus Karori from Progene Seeds said: “I have never attended a similar training before, so it was very useful. I learnt how to implement field trials as well principles of hybrid seed production.”

Many thanks to the course organizers and resource personnel: Charles Mutimaamba, Maize Coordinator, Department of Agricultural Research and Special Services in Zimbabwe, and CIMMYT’s Peter Setimela, Cosmos Magorokosho, Amsal Tarekegne, John MacRobert, Jill Cairns, Sebastian Mawere, Pamela Chirwa, and Oswell Ndoro.

By Susan MacMillan, ILRI

Speaking on ‘Sustainable food systems for food security’, Marianne Banziger, a scientist at the CGIAR maize and wheat centre (CIMMYT), this afternoon gave a ‘Rank Lecture’ at the Planet Under Pressure Conference in London.

She began with a bald statistic: To meet the food security challenges converging over the next 50 years, she said, we will have to produce as much food as has been consumed over the entire history of humankind.

Things did not get better after that.

We can expect more food price hikes, she argued, like those the world experienced in 2008 and 2010. Those peaks were due to low stocks; food prices went up three-fold and food prices have never returned to 2006 levels.

A large part of the changing food situation, Banziger explained, is due to the many people in developing countries that are newly incorporating into their largely starch-based diets meat, milk and eggs. However, most people gaining a bit of disposable income for the first time and using it to buy animal-source foods are still consuming far less of these foods than people in rich countries.

Biofuels are complicating the situation further: some 40% of the US maize crop now goes to biofuel, which is more than what is produced for animal feed.

Food price increases push people back into poverty, she reminded her audience. As food prices increase, and people find food less and less affordable, the proportion of their consumption of staple crops increases. If we do not act, food and energy price inflation will exceed income growth of the poor—pushing them further into poverty.

Living on borrowed resources

What goes up must come down: As fertilizer prices go up, the profitability and yields of smallholder farmers in developing countries go down.

Some 300 million people in India and China are sustained with grain grown from the over-pumping of water (that is, water resources not renewed by rainfall).

Social unrest is likely to come back again and again; deforestation, water scarcity and human migration are all likely to increase,

We still have the time to act.

Science usefully provides us with options.

We could reduce our consumption of food. How many of us now recycle and conserve water? Reduce food wastage? Eat less meat? These actions reduce demand. Those people now climbing out of poverty have as much right as we do to eat well.

On the other hand, we could increase our production of food.

The more we delay investments in this, the steeper will be the challenges we face.

Among new opportunities for increasing productivity are use of precision agriculture and cell phones (for conducting financial transactions, buying crop and input insurance).

We should not make the same mistakes as in the past by focusing on higher productivity alone. Farmers also need to generate greater income, to build greater resilience to shocks, to conduct sustainable farming, and to access viable markets and value chains.

Eyes wide open

Closing the yield gap among today’s marginalized farmers will not be enough, Banziger said. Farmers in the Indo-Gangetic Plains now grow wheat for 700 million people. But the encroachment of heat on these plains is expected to reduce yields 20–30% by 2050.

We need to explore the untapped biodiversity of staple crops. Drought-tolerant maize varieties have succeeded in the past. We’re looking for heat tolerance in wheat. Will transgenics be needed? The challenges are extreme, so ‘we need to keep our eyes open’.

Catch 22

At the close of Banziger’s presentation, a population expert in the audience asked what he might have presumed to be a rhetorical question: Why had Banziger omitted all reference to reducing the human population as a main method of ensuring food security?

Banziger responded forthrightly: It is not the increasing numbers of people per se that is the greatest factor in our food challenges, she said. Rather, it is the great numbers of people who are escaping absolute poverty (especially in India, China and Southeast Asia), and who are improving the quality of their diets as they do so by adding animal-source and other highly nutritious foods to their daily meals.

The implications are that reducing the numbers of people on the planet will not solve our food problems if great numbers of those people that remain keep moving out of poverty–a trajectory that many of this conference’s delegates are spending their professional lives working to advance.

Day #1 of CIMMYT Visitors Week, Ciudad Obregon, Sonora, Mexico

One wall is dominated by a map of the Yaqui Valley, speckled with LED dots and flanked by computer projections. Two metre high maps of the region cover the side and back walls. In the middle of the room is one small desk, manned by one single technician. This is the control room of the Yaqui Valley District Irrigation System.

In 1992, the Mexican Government transferred management of the region’s irrigation channels to the farmers and their unions. The irrigation system is now controlled at this station, and consists of over 200 wells and three dams, providing water for 220,000 hectares of irrigated farmland.

The aquifer of the Yaqui Valley contains 600 million cubic metres, and is one of the few unexploited aquifers in Mexico. The irrigation station has permission to use the water, but they must also replace the supply. However, the severe droughts of 2003-2004 showed the organization that they could not only rely on their natural water supplies; when the dams almost ran dry they realised that they needed to format a plan to combat these dry periods. The existing computer system is the result of this forward thinking; the wells can be turned on or off from anywhere in the world using the organization’s wifi system,monitoring systems instantly send out alerts if a problem arises, and on-site cameras allow both monitoring of water releases and act as a security measure.

Generally, the water used for irrigation is 80% from the dams and 20% from the wells. Once a month, the organization’s laboratory tests the well water for salinity levels, so that the percentages of each type of source water can be adjusted to create the ideal water nutrient levels for agriculture. When the district received control of the system, 20,000 hectares of the land had salinity problems, but they have now managed to reduce this to just 4,000 hectares through a process they call “washing” the land.

But the irrigation station is not resting on its laurels. The Yaqui Valley produces 80% of Mexico’s wheat, and 74% of the Yaqui Valley’s crop is wheat. With this in mind, it’s no surprise that a mural declaring “The future is in our hands” is the first thing you see when you enter the station.

Many of us often underestimate the importance of water on our daily lives – that is until the taps run out of water or the well runs dry. For farmers, their lives are intimately connected to the abundance or lack of water. Many farmers in the developing world produce crops which are dependent on unpredictable patterns of rainfall. For these farmers, water is not only a resource, but truly the source of life.

When there is a lack of rain, it’s not only the crops that suffer, but farmers’ livestock, incomes, and livelihoods are put in jeopardy. In periods of drought, children are often the most vulnerable segment of the population. Children often suffer from malnutrition, stunting, and starvation as the result of drought, causing long-term effects on their health and well-being.

Episodes of drought have occurred with increasing intensity and frequency in recent months. The drought in the Horn of Africa – which began in July 2011 – has been called the worst drought in the region in over 60 years. The lack of food and grain has resulted in the tripling of prices in some areas. Millions of people continue to suffer from extreme hunger, starvation, and in some areas, famine. The current drought in Mexico has been called the worst drought in 70 years. As a result, farmers have lost over a billion dollars worth of crops since the drought began in October 2011. The effect of these severe droughts will be seen for years to come.

As we reflect on World Water Day, let us not only recognize how important water is to our everyday lives, but also acknowledge those who are developing more efficient solutions for water usage. Today, over 70 percent of the water used globally goes towards agriculture. How we use water for farming is one of the most important issues to address in the management of global water consumption.

In response to this challenge, our scientists are working to develop crops that can produce higher yields with less water. Our agronomists are working to develop systems which conserve water through the management of soils. Our researchers are developing systems which better utilize and apply agricultural inputs – such as pesticides and fertilizer – so that fewer chemicals enter our water sources.

We are all interconnected. Lack of water in one area also impacts other regions through the elevation of food prices, availability of staple foods, and competition for resources. As the world’s population expands to 9 billion – each of us have to take responsibility to address and reflect on how we utilize water. Today, let’s remember just how vitally important water is to our lives, to our planet, and to our future.

Visitors to the Centro Experimental de Norman E. Borlaug (CENEB) station, near Ciudad Obregon, Sonora, were lucky enough to witness the launch of CIMMYT’s first blimp on 13 March 2012. Made possible through generous support from the Sustainable Modernization of Traditional Agriculture (MasAgro) project, the 8-meter helium-filled balloon underpins the airborne remote-sensing “platform” of the CIMMYT wheat physiology group. It will help analyze the physiological properties of thousands of wheat lines being tested as part of the Mexican phenotyping platform (MEXPLAT).

“The blimp enables us to take data from large areas that previously had to be covered on foot,” said Maria Tattaris, a remote sensing specialist from the UK who has been working as a CIMMYT Post-Doc since January. Floating up to 300 meters above the fields, it provides a tactical vantage point for a thermal infrared imager and multispectral camera mounted on its underside. With four handlers guiding the blimp using ropes tied to the head and tail, its devices will quickly capture images and readings for attributes such as canopy temperature, stomatal conductance, canopy water content, vegetation indices, and pigment indices—all without having to destructively sample plants. The data will reveal plant stress levels under varying environments, as well as estimates of canopy biomass, growth rates, and photosynthetic capacity. The blimp also allows single, large-area measurements, helping avoid temporal variation effects. Finally, mounting multiple cameras enables simultaneous readings on different plant canopy properties in a specific area.

Obregón’s soaring dirigible will soon share airspace with another remotesensing UAV—“unmanned aerial vehicle,” in fly-tech parlance: the AscTec Falcon 8, a camera-loaded, propellor-driven drone that looks like a dragonfly but takes high-resolution infrared and multispectral images.

The blimp launch caused a sensation among CENEB staff and 60 members of the Wheat Yield Consortium (WYC), hailing from 30 countries and currently in Obregón for the Consortium’s 2nd international workshop. According to Tattaris, data detected by the new bird’s-eye sensors should significantly further WYC work.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway recently received 25,000 seed samples from all over the world. Speaking to NPR radio, Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which runs the Svalbard vault, highlighted the importance not only of storing new and current varieties, but also the old varieties that farmers do not use anymore. In doing so the genepool can be preserved and we can safeguard for future eventualities such as climate change or the emergence of new diseases, he said.

Among the batch of seeds was the vault’s first delivery from Tajikistan. CIMMYT wheat breeder Alexey Morgounov also featured in the NPR weekend segment, which typically has a listenership of over one million. Originally from Russia but now based in Turkey, Morgounov spoke about the unusual nature of wheat farming in Tajikistan. Unlike most other wheat-growing countries, farmers in Tajikistan are still planting the same ancient varieties that have been cultivated on the land for thousands of years. “They don’t want to give up growing them,” says Morgounov, “because those varieties have the taste and texture that they want.”

Instead it is the attitude of breeders that is changing. Morgounov says that before, he would have tried to persuade farmers to replace their old varieties with new, more productive kinds of wheat. Now however, he works with the farmers to improve the ancient wheat lines through traditional methods, whilst retaining the qualities that Tajikistanis desire in their flatbreads. In a country where homemade bread is “the centrepiece of life,” according to Morgounov, and where the people get half their calories from such bread, this is a very important mission indeed, and means that these ancient varieties can be preserved not only in genebanks such as the Svalbard vault and CIMMYT’s own genebank, but in the field as well.

You can listen to the NPR segment here.

A three-day workshop on QTL Mapping and Breeding Simulation was held during 7–9 March 2012, at the Plant Breeding Institute of the University of Sydney, Cobbitty, Australia. It was attended by 35 participants, included plant geneticists, breeders, and graduate students from across Australia. The workshop was the ninth in a series organized by CIMMYT’s Jiankang Wang with the help of the CIMMYT Biometric and Statistics Unit and his team in China. Previous workshops were held in China, Mexico, and at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).

The workshop format included lectures, practice exercises and discussions. The themes covered included: an introduction to plant breeding and quantitative genetics; linkage analysis and genetic map construction; QTL mapping methods; and principles of breeding simulation. The practice exercises provided for comments and suggestions on using the QTL IciMapping software and QU-GENE simulation tools, and allowed for closer interaction between the trainers and participants.

Primary lecturers at the workshop included Richard Trethowan (University of Sydney), Jiankang Wang (CIMMYT-China and Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences), and Luyan Zhang (Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and CIMMYT consultant). Richard worked at CIMMYT from 1996 to 2006 as head of wheat breeding for rainfed environments, and continues to be a valued collaborator and member of the CIMMYT family. Jiankang is a quantitative geneticist based in Beijing, and Luyan is currently working with him on QTL mapping methodology.

The danger posed by the Ug99 strain of the disease stem rust to global wheat production is well recognized, and Bangladesh is no exception. Wheat is one of the major cereals in Bangladesh, ranking second after rice with a cultivated area of 0.38 m ha and average yield of 2.6 t/ha. In a major step in countering the disease threat, a new wheat variety, named Francolin, was released on 06 March 2012. Also known as BARI Gom 27 (previously BAW 1120), Francolin, first introduced to Bangladesh in 2008 from CIMMYT-Mexico, possesses good resistance to all variants of Ug99 along with an impressive agronomic performance. It yielded approximately 10% more than the most popular variety Shatabdi in three years of multi-location testing in Bangladesh.

Its performance in on-farm testing was also significantly superior to all check varieties. “Francolin is popular among the participating farmers because of its high grain yield potential and good agronomic traits,” said T.P. Tiwari, cropping systems agronomist at CIMMYT-Bangladesh, adding that it also performed better than other varieties during on-farm testing.

Francolin is already under demonstration in farmers’ fields through participatory variety selection (PVS), the multi-location testing (MLT) program of the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), and a participatory seed multiplication program. These activities are being jointly implemented by BARI’s Wheat Research Centre (WRC) and CIMMYT, and are also well integrated into the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA) validation and demonstration programs in Bangladesh. According to CIMMYT scientists T.P. Tiwari and Arun K. Joshi, seed multiplication of this variety is in progress on 55 ha in 23 different locations in Bangladesh during the current crop cycle. This is expected to produce around 150 tons of seed that will be available for the next planting season, meeting the needs of the Bangladesh Agricultural Development Corporation (BADC) and the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE), the government agencies responsible for large-scale seed production and distribution. Francolin is also being disseminated through informal channels (farmer-to-farmer).

This step toward mitigating the threat of Ug99 was made possible in part by a USAID seed-multiplication famine fund program. The WRC and CIMMYT-Bangladesh are working together under this program to identify suitable Ug99-resistant varieties, and carry out seed production and delivery. Israel Hossain, Abu Zaman Sarker (WRC), T.P. Tiwari, M. Gathala, and T. Krupnik (CIMMYT) also report that Francolin is performing exceedingly well under conservation agriculture (CA) practices such as strip- and zero-tillage.

The WRC and CIMMYT are developing linkages between seed producers and traders to facilitate marketing. Additionally, information regarding the benefits of growing Ug99-resistant varieties is disseminated through media outlets such as newspapers, radio, and television. The first Ug99-resistant wheat variety to be released in Bangladesh was BARI Gom 26 (previously known as BAW, and popularly called Hashi), in 2010. The two new varieties are expected to cover just over 5% of the total wheat area in 2012/13.

Wheat scientists involved in the development of Francolin include Naresh C.D. Barma, Paritosh Kumar Malaker, Dinabandhu Pandit, Md. Abdul Hakim, and Jalal Uddin, among others. Agronomists and soil scientists from BARI and CIMMYT-Bangladesh were also involved in its validation and promotional activities.

In February 2012 several CIMMYT staff working in Sustainable Intensification of Maize-Legume Cropping Systems for Food Security in Eastern and Southern Africa (SIMLESA), including project leader Mulugetta Mekuria, Peter Setimela, and Isaiah Nyagumbo, as well as the national coordinators, made field visits and met with farmers who are collaborating in participatory trials in their own fields. SIMLESA is a four year program that was launched in March 2010 and is being funded by the Australian Centre for International Agriculture Research (ACIAR). The project has adopted mother-baby trials (MBT), where farmers choose varieties that interest them from a central “mother” trial and test them out on their own farms in “baby” trials, as a way of evaluating new drought tolerant maize and legume varieties under farmer-managed conditions.

In the Manica Province of Mozambique, SIMLESA has been able to gear up its MBT activities through collaboration with farmers’ association IDEEA-CA, reaching out to more farmers through the association’s networks in and around the province. Improved varieties, appropriate use of commercial fertilizers, and the adoption of conservation agriculture (CA) practices have the potential to significantly improve the livelihoods of poor resource farmers in the region. The “yellow trial”, for example—with replications with and without fertilizer—demonstrates the advantages of using fertilizers.

The trials have provided a voice for farmers as they try out new drought tolerant maize and legume varieties in their fields and have the opportunity to influence seed companies to multiply the varieties they prefer. “It took me two seasons to appreciate the yields of the new hybrid,” said Marcello Chikukwa of Sussundenga District. “I was suspicious of the small plant size as compared to our local variety. But I realised that the local variety takes long to mature and had too much herbage, and the stem was very tall but the yields were very low.”

The testimony of farmers like Chikukwa is building momentum as farmers gain exposure to new drought tolerant maize and legumes in combination with CA practices and fertilizer use. The project also facilitates the creation of seed road maps, collaborating with diverse partners to produce certified seed and run promotion activities. Seed companies like Dengo Commercial in Mozambique are participating in seed production and promotion of new drought tolerant varieties, which are expected to produce good yields despite erratic rainfall in the region. Nine maize varieties and ten soya bean varieties are being promoted in three districts of Mozambique and six districts in Malawi.

The United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) has won Best Technological Breakthrough at the 2012 UK Climate Week Awards for its support to the Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa (DTMA) project. The awards were held in London on 12 March 2012 to celebrate the UK’s most effective and ambitious organizations, communities, and individuals and their efforts to combat climate change.

DTMA has been responsible for the development and dissemination of 34 new drought-tolerant maize varieties to farmers in 13 project countries—Angola, Benin, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe—between 2007 and 2011. An estimated two million smallholder farmers are already using the drought-tolerant maize varieties and have obtained higher yields, improved food security, and increased incomes.

Drought-tolerant varieties are invaluable on a continent where maize is the staple crop for over 300 million people, and nearly always relies on rainwater alone. The DTMA varieties, produced by conventional breeding, provide farmers with better yields than leading commercial varieties under moderate drought conditions, while also giving outstanding harvests when rains are good. DTMA works with a diverse network of partners to develop, market, and distribute seed, including private companies, publicly funded agricultural research and extension systems, ministries of agriculture, nongovernmental organizations, and community-based seed producers.

Jointly implemented by CIMMYT and the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA), the DTMA project is presently funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and is also receiving complementary grants from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation (HGBF) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

“DFID has been a highly-valued and reliable, top-ten core contributor to CIMMYT’s work,” said DTMA project leader Wilfred Mwangi. In addition, the efforts of DTMA build on long-term support from the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC), the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Rockefeller Foundation, USAID, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and the Eiselen-Foundation.

From SciDev.Net: Root-imaging technology could improve crop resilience

By Aleida Rueda

[MEXICO CITY] Mexican researchers have welcomed a breakthrough in imaging plant roots, saying it could help breeders develop new varieties of crops that can thrive in harsh conditions.

The technique uses X-ray computed tomography to build up a three-dimensional image by scanning through 360 degrees, a technology commonly used in hospitals to diagnose soft tissue damage.

Scans of plant roots in soil show the shape and branching patterns of the roots, but do not clearly distinguish between the roots and surrounding soil and organic matter.

Now scientists at the Centre for Plant Integrative Biology (CPIB) at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom, have developed imaging software — called “RooTrak” — to analyse the scans and display the roots as a distinct three-dimensional structure. Their findings are reported in the February issue of Plant Physiology.

“This is the first time this approach has been used for this purpose and the results are very promising,” Malcolm Bennett, the project’s leader, told SciDev.Net.

As well as providing clearer imaging, the method is fast and non-invasive because roots can be analysed without having to remove the surrounding soil. The technique has passed initial tests on maize, tomato and wheat grown in a range of contrasting soil textures.

The CPIB has been awarded US$4.5 million by the European Research Council to test the technology in Australia, Europe and Mexico.

The Mexican collaboration is being coordinated by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), which plans to use the technology to screen wheat for a variety of traits including heat and drought tolerance, and water and nutrient use.

While the technology was welcomed by researchers contacted by SciDev.Net they all expressed concern that it might be too costly for widespread adoption in developing countries.

But the technology could benefit plant breeders, according to Matthew Reynolds, a wheat physiologist at CIMMYT in Mexico who will oversee the collaboration.

“This technique will open enormous possibilities for understanding the interaction between trees and annual crops [such as maize and beans] at the level of their root systems, particularly under conditions of drought and root competition between species,” said Antonio Turrent Fernández, of Mexico’s National Institute of Agricultural, Livestock and Forestry Research (INIFAP).

Alejandro Espinosa Calderón, also from INIFAP, said the technology “could help [researchers] select plants with favourable root architecture, shape, depth and size that could thrive in adverse conditions”.

REFERENCES: Plant Physiology 158, 569 (2012)