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Workshop on Mexico-USDA project: boosting farm productivity in the State of Mexico

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Farmers in the State of Mexico, which borders the country’s capital, Mexico City—a potential market of nearly 20 million inhabitants— have struggled to make a profit growing maize. The state accounts for 10% of the national maize production, but improved varieties occupy no more than 10-15% of its maize area. Nearly all (97%) of the maize they produce is white grained and of varieties ideal for local foods but that don’t meet quality requirements for largescale, commercial tortilla production nor fit demand for feed or industrial uses.

As part of a project launched in 2007 between the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Mexican Agriculture Secretariat (Secretaria de Agricultura, Ganadería, Desarrollo Rural, Pesca y Alimentación, or SAGARPA), CIMMYT is working with counterparts in the State of Mexico to increase the productivity and profitability of maize farming. The focus is on value-added white and colored maize for food, but partly in response to rising interest from farmers since the biofuels boom, participants are developing, testing, and promoting yellow grain maize suited for feed and industrial markets. To plan those and other activities, to assemble a database of maize varieties—both improved and landrace—grown in the State, and to build the team, 11 maize scientists gathered for a workshop at El Batán during 19-21 February 2008.

Participants came from the Mexican National Institute of Forestry, Agriculture, and Livestock Research (INIFAP), Mexico State’s Institute of Agriculture, Livestock, Water, and Forestry Research and Training (ICAMEX), the Colegio de Postgraduados (a graduate-level agricultural research and learning institution), and CIMMYT. They were introduced to CROPSTAT, a software package for analyzing multi-location trial data, by CIMMYT maize breeder and project leader Gary Atlin, and discussed ways to foster farmer participation in trials.

“We’ll be doing three types of trials in 2008,” says Silverio García, CIMMYT maize researcher working on the project. “One involves experimental varieties that are crosses between improved and local materials, another is an evaluation of pre-commercial varieties in 20 or more environments in the State, and the last comprise on-farm demonstrations of commercially available white and yellow hybrids, to get farmers’ feedback.” Former CIMMYT maize breeder and distinguished scientist, Hugo Cordova, is serving as a consultant to the project.

Rajaram retires

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After an outstanding career of 40 years in agricultural research, former CIMMYT wheat researcher, Wheat Program Director, and Distinguished Scientist, Dr. Sanjaya Rajaram—known affectionately at CIMMYT simply as “Raj”—formally retired on 10 February 2008 from his positions as Director of Integrated Gene Management at the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) and Director of the ICARDA/CIMMYT Wheat Improvement Program (ICWIP) in the Central and West Asia and North Africa (CWANA) region.

Rajaram led bread wheat breeding research at CIMMYT for more than three decades. His leadership and commitment to wheat improvement resulted in the release of more than 450 cultivars with increased yield potential, wide adaptation, and resistance to important diseases and stresses. These are grown on some 58 million hectares worldwide and approximately 8 million hectares in India, and include India’s most popular wheat variety, PBW 343. He also led efforts at CIMMYT to apply the concept of durable resistance to rust—the most damaging disease of wheat worldwide—through use of multiple genes with minor effects that slow disease development, thereby minimizing effects on yield without challenging the pathogen to mutate and overcome resistance. His accomplishments include training or mentoring more than 700 scientists from dozens of developing countries, including many from India.

Rajaram will live in Mexico and plans to continue his breeding association with Resource Seed Inc., a Wheat/TCL Breeding Company based in California. Congratulations, and best of luck in the future, Raj!

Course for safe handling of hazardous materials

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On 06 and 07 of February 2008, Julio Flores and Samuel Frías of APER gave a course at El Batán on “Proper management of dangerous materials,” to staff from the laboratories, greenhouses, ICT, and germplasm bank. The course was given as part of the preparations for an evacuation drill that will shortly take place in these areas. A total of 29 staff participated in the simulation. During the course, the group learned about the necessary protective equipment for emergencies in areas where dangerous materials are stored, and how to use protective equipment, especially when handling hazardous materials. There was a simulation where two people had to be “helped” after coming into contact with toxic products. The group applied the skills learned during the session, and used protective overalls, boots, helmets, masks, and oxygen equipment.

Mini-course on the analysis of maize diversity

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As part of on-going efforts to facilitate the use of DNA markers in maize breeding and diversity studies, during 01-06 February 2008 CIMMYT El Batán held a workshop on “The analysis of molecular data generated from genetic bulked heterogenous populations.” Coordinated by CIMMYT molecular biologist Marilyn Warburton and visiting biometrician Jorge Franco, of the Universidad de la República, Uruguay, the course drew six participants from six different countries, in addition to CIMMYT participants. According to Warburton, the workshop turned out to be of great interest to CIMMYT scientists. “We had three people signed up from outside when we started, and gave certificates to another ten or twelve CIMMYT people in the end,” she says. Participants included Allen Oppong (Ghana), Tunde Golinar (Hungary), Niclas Freitag (Switzerland), Yusuf Mansir (Nigeria), Marlen Huebner (Germany), Guy Davenport (CIMMYT), Trushar Shah (CIMMYT), Miguel Anducho (CIMMYT), Eduardo Hernández (CIMMYT), Jianbing Yan (CIMMYT), Shibin Gao (CIMMYT), Maria Zaharieva (CIMMYT), Claudia Bedoya (CIMMYT), and Aida Zewdu Kebede (Ethiopia).

Impacts assessment seminar in Nairobi

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On 28 January, Roberto La Rovere, CIMMYT Impact Specialist, launched two new tools recently developed by CIMMYT’s ITAU “Operational guidelines for assessing impacts of agricultural research on livelihooods”, and the “Manual to conduct socioeconomic surveys through Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs)”, with participants from various CGIAR centers, during a session themed “Tools to capture impacts of our work on livelihoods,” organized by CIMMYT Kenya at the ICRAF campus in Nairobi.

Impact assessment (IA) is changing, with the focus shifting from calculating rates of return to measuring impacts on the livelihoods of those targeted by agricultural R&D projects. The Operational Guidelines, coauthored by La Rovere and John Dixon, are aimed at practitioners in impact assessment, particularly at managers who want to write IA projects or projects with an IA component, and at our partners in the field. The Guidelines provide a step-by-step guide on how to plan for and conduct an IA, considering aspects such as cost, capacity, and team composition, and indicators of how to measure impact. Participants held engaging discussions on how to attribute the roles of different partners, how to build IA into program design, and how to discern the effects of confounding factors in determining impact on livelihoods.

The second tool, the PDA Manual, jointly developed by La Rovere and Federico Carrion, guides users on the applications of these devices for collecting quality socio-economic data more quickly. The manual shows how to download the program and how to enter and analyze data, and provides sample surveys. The tool can also be used for agronomic or other types of surveys. The potential for using PDAs in various circumstances and types of surveys raised the interest of participants. Useful for quantitative surveys, the PDA has already been used in IA studies in multi-country surveys in Africa. Its advantages and disadvantages and areas of application were discussed in the seminar.

A similar seminar will be given at El Batán to launch the tools internally. The manuals are available on the CIMMYT website under the “Impacts and impact evaluation” sub-heading of the ITAU page, and users are encouraged to provide feedback for improving them.

A visit with Guadalupe Guevara, former germplasm bank assistant

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To mark the occasion of 20 years after his retirement, former maize germplasm bank assistant, Guadalupe Guevara, was paid a visit on 24 January 2008 by Suketoshi Taba, head of maize genetic resources, Mauro Ramírez, head of maize seed shipments, and consultant Garrison Wilkes. Prior to his retirement, Don Lupe, as he was known, had worked for more than 37 years in international agricultural research initiatives predating the Office of Special studies, and counted among his colleagues some well-known researchers from CIMMYT’s history, including Ed Wellhausen and Mario Gutiérrez. He was very pleased to see the group of old friends, who found him in excellent spirits and health. All the best, Don Lupe!

John Deere demonstration

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On Friday 25 January, representatives from the Texcoco office of John Deere gave a demonstration at El Batán of mid-size tractors and other equipment for intermediate-scale farmers. The event was organized by the Mexico State Secretary of Agriculture and Livestock Development (SEDAGRO), with support from station superintendent Francisco Magallanes, and drew 50 participants.

Drought phenotyping workshop

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From 28-30 January 2008, the Genration Challenge Programme (GCP) lived up to its middle name and organized a workshop on an intricate challenge— drought phenotyping. Held at CIMMYT’s El Batán facilities, the workshop brought together experts from diverse disciplines—crop physiologists, GIS specialists, model developers, to name several—to address more effectively the increasing phenotyping needs from genomic studies and breeding programs. During the workshop, several options for tackling the complexity of drought phenotyping in GCP projects were discussed, centering on:

    • Improving environment characterization, based on GIS, water balance models, and their combination.
    • Improving phenotypic data collection through better experimental designs, protocols, and data capture.
    • Selecting potential hubs, based on climatic representativeness and existing facilities and expertise.
    • Common activities were agreed upon by the participants, who developed a workplan to be further refined and implemented in the coming
      months.

The participants were: Gregory Edmeades (Consultant), Abraham Blum (Consultant), Glenn Hyman (CIAT, Colombia), Sam Geerts (Leuven University, Belgium), Robert Koebner (Consultant), Paul Brennan (Consultant), Reinaldo Gomide (EMBRAPA, Brazil), John O’Toole (Consultant), Guy Davenport (CIMMYT), Rosemary Shrestha (CIMMYT), Eduardo Hernández (CIMMYT), Humberto Gómez (GCP), Jean-Marcel Ribaut (GCP), and Philippe Monneveux (GCP).

Visit of VIP from the Chinese Embassy

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Mr. Qingqing Zhao, head of Science and Technology issues in the Chinese Embassy in Mexico, visited CIMMYT on 29 January 2008 to broaden his knowledge of China and CIMMYT’s long-time, fruitful partnerships. This was his first visit, and fulfilled an intention he’d had since his arrival in Mexico in September 2007. Zhao was welcomed by Director General Masa Iwanaga, and also met with staff including Thomas Payne, Kevin Pixley, Erika Meng, Peter Ninnes, and Suketoshi Taba to learn more about China-CIMMYT collaboration and discuss how the Chinese Embassy can support the efforts. Highlights of his tour of the facilities included the germplasm bank and the Applied Biotechnology Center, and he also met with CIMMYT staff from China: Huixia Wu, Jianbing Yan, Shibin Gao, Xiaoyun Li, and Yunbi Xu.

Fieldbook course for maize breeders and assistants

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During 21-25 January, 29 persons attended a course at El Batán on Fieldbook and MaizeFinder. Organized by Eduardo Hernández, of the CRIL, with support from Marianne Bänziger and Kevin Pixley, director and associate director of the Global Maize Program, the aim was to train maize workers in orderly data management. Fieldbook is an application used to prepare seed for trials, manage trial data, print labels, record data, manage breeding program inventories, conduct statistical analyses, and implement selection indexes.

Instructors were Fredy Salazar (CIMMYT-Colombia), Juan Carlos Alarcón, and Eduardo Hernández (CIMMYT-Mexico), who demonstrated the advantages and functionality of Fieldbook, a package developed by Bänziger and perfected by CIMMYT maize breeder, Bindiganavile S. Vivek. Participants included maize breeders and technicians, as well as others who might find the application useful. The course also covered MaizeFinder, a database that permits advanced searches for germplasm with particular traits of interest, and CropFinder, a prototype program that will allow the same functions for rice, wheat, and maize. Petr Kosina, Jennifer Jones, and Ricardo de la Rosa recorded the event on video for future training uses.

Participants were: Víctor Chávez, Luciano Juárez, Marcial Rivas, Martín Rodríguez, Simón Pastrana, Eva Huerta, Carlos Martínez, María Zaharieva, Martha Hernández, Natalia Palacios, Adolfo Basilio, Andrés Corona, José Luis Torres, Hilda Hernández, Fernando Juárez, Silverio Ávila, George Mahuku, Carlos Muñoz, Efrén Rodríguez, Daniel Fernández, Gerónimo Ortega, Israel Sánchez, Manuel Lorenzo López, Mayolo Leyva, Ciro Sánchez, Óscar García, Sotero Rivas, Beatriz Morales, Silverio García y Mansir Yusuf.

Three tons of seed shipped to Svalbard vault

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On 22 January 2008, CIMMYT sent more than 160 boxes of seed for long-term deposit in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Norway. The shipment comprised 10,000 maize accessions and 48,000 of wheat, and weighed around 3 tons in all. It was part of 200,000 seed collections of crop varieties sent this month for storage in the vault from CGIAR germplasm banks worldwide. The vault was built by the Norwegian government as a service to the global community, and a Rome-based international NGO, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, will fund its operation. The aim is to ensure that the collections remain available for bolstering food security, should a man-made or natural disaster ever threaten agricultural systems or germplasm bank collections.

CIMMYT’s shipment was drawn from regenerations performed over the past two years, and represents roughly a third of the center’s entire collection of crop genetic resources. The CGIAR shipments, were brought to the attention of the global media through timely public-relations efforts of the CG Secretariat communications team, with support from Burness Associates. Reports have appeared to date on 8 wire services, 5 TV and radio stations, 10 newspapers, and 6 web-based outlets. Coverage in Mexico included articles in the major dailies El Universal and La Jornada, as well as a spot in the Canal 11 evening news, all reflecting favorably on CIMMYT.

Congratulations to Tom Payne, Suketoshi Taba, Bibiana Espinosa, Víctor Chávez, and all staff in the germplasm bank and seed areas, who coordinated and prepared the shipment and interacted with reporters. Thanks as well to Rodomiro Ortiz, who served as CIMMYT spokesperson to the media for this initiative.

Did you know?

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Since 1966 and throughout its history, CIMMYT has sought to enhance the human resources available for agricultural research related to its own objectives. In doing so, CIMMYT has helped candidates study for professional qualifications or higher degrees at appropriate universities. The library at CIMMYT headquarters maintains a list of theses in which CIMMYT is named, and its support—either financial or through the use of its research resources—is recognized in the thesis itself or in a journal article based on the thesis. The list has 867 theses presented at 170 academic institutions, located in 44 countries, and represents the work of 795 scientists from 75 countries. (To see the list visit: http://staging.cimmyt.org/ libtools/thesis.htm.

IWIS/ICIS course in Spanish at El Batán

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During 7-11 January 2007, Jesper Norgaard of the IRRI-CIMMYT Crops Research Informatics Lab (CRIL) gave a course for Spanish-speaking CIMMYT staff on IWIS3, the latest version of the International Wheat Information System and on the related International Crop Information System (ICIS). The two systems integrate data on the geneologies, yields, general performance, and other traits of IRRI and CIMMYT mandate crops.

Participants: Hans Joachim Braun, Vicente Morales, Yann Manes, Martín Rodríguez, Karim Ammar, Leopoldo Arteaga, Luis Banderas, Etienne Duveiller, Nérida Lozano, Francisco López, Thomas Payne, Bibiana Espinosa, Sergio González, María Luisa Gómez, Eduardo Hernández, Juan Carlos Alarcón, Gary Atlin, Manuel López Nava, Mayolo Leyva, Susanne Dreisigacker, Efrén Rodríguez, Ismael Barrera, Gerónimo Ortega, Daniel Fernández, and Luis Banderas.

CIMMYT researcher helps find cheaper way to Vitamin-A enhanced maize

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In a development reported this week in Science magazine and which could enhance the nutritional status of millions of people in developing countries, a team of plant geneticists and crop scientists including CIMMYT’s Jianbing Yan pioneered an economical approach to boost levels of provitamin A in maize. ‘Provitamin A’ describes substances that are converted to vitamin A upon consumption. The team showed that variation at the lycopene epsilon cyclase (lcyE) locus—favorable alleles of which can be selected using molecular markers—controls biosynthesis pathways for Vitamin A precursors in maize.

Vitamin A deficiency is a leading cause of eye disease and other health disorders in the developing world. Some 40 million children are afflicted with eye disease, and another 250 million suffer with health problems resulting from a lack of dietary vitamin A. Selecting for provitamin A in maize normally involves expensive lab analyses, so the ability to use DNA markers for this purpose should reduce costs significantly.

“I played a very small part in the study, and more work needs to be done” says Yan, who came to CIMMYT in October 2006 from the China Agricultural University, Beijing. “I helped to re-confirm the markers and fix some tables.” According to Yan, molecular markers associated with lcyE are being used in several institutes around the world, including CIMMYT, for breeding to enhance the vitamin A value of maize. He will give a seminar at El Batán on Monday, 21 January in B115 at 3:30.

Polar bears and permafrost: Keeping maize and wheat seed safe against a global catastrophe

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jan01CIMMYT recently sent three tons of maize and wheat seed to a “doomsday vault” near the North Pole to keep it—and the valuable genetic diversity it embodies—safe for future generations.

On 22 January 2008, CIMMYT sent more than 160 boxes of seed for long-term deposit in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Norway. The shipment comprised 10,000 seed collections of maize and 47,000 of wheat, held in trust by CIMMYT, and weighed around 3 tons in all. “This represents roughly a third of the center’s entire collection of crop genetic resources,” says Tom Payne, head of wheat genetic resources at CIMMYT. The shipment was part of more than 230,000 seed samples of crop varieties sent this month for storage in the vault, from germplasm banks of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), NGOs, and national program collections.

Sheltering frail seed

As any farmer knows, seed is the basis of the world’s food supply. For plant breeders, seed also holds the genetic diversity needed to defend crops against adverse conditions, like drought and heat, or against damaging pests and diseases. But, whereas genetic diversity strengthens crops against threats, the seed that bears it is relatively vulnerable. In 1998, for example, Hurricane Mitch’s floodwaters destroyed the maize seed of Honduran farmers and of a national institution in charge of seed. In another case, during Latin America’s “lost decade” economic crisis of the 1980s, many national seed banks lacked funds to maintain adequately unique collections of native maize landraces no longer grown in farmers’ fields.

“In both instances, we helped replenish or regenerate the lost or endangered seed collections, but these and other cases illustrate the natural fragility of seed and the need for multiple safeguards,” says Suketoshi Taba, head of maize genetic resources at CIMMYT. The center’s own seed collections are held in constant low-temperature and low-humidity conditions in a concrete bunker at CIMMYT’s El Batán, Mexico, facilities. They are secured against earthquakes, power outages, insect or rodent damage, and other threats.

Food and diversity for future generations

The Svalbard vault, which will open officially on 27 February 2008, provides another level of security. It was built by the Norwegian government as a service to the global community, and a Rome-based international NGO, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, will fund its operation. Its aim is to ensure that seed collections remain safe against cataclysmic events, such as a nuclear war, natural disasters, accidents, mismanagement, or short-sighted budget cuts. Carved into rock and permafrost on an island where polar bears roam, the vault can conserve seed for hundreds and, in the case of some crop species, thousands of years.

CIMMYT’s own germplasm bank conserves more than 140,000 collections of wheat and its relatives from over 100 countries—the largest unified collection in the world for a single crop. For maize, the center conserves more than 25,000 unique seed collections, including the world’s largest store of maize landraces (traditional farmer varieties), along with samples of the wild relatives teosinte and Tripsacum spp. and of improved varieties. The maize collections represent nearly 90% of maize diversity in the Americas, the hemisphere of origin for the crop. “Most of the seed collections are held ‘in trust’—that is, under long-term storage for the benefit of humanity and free from any intellectual property restrictions,” according to Masa Iwanaga, CIMMYT Director General. CIMMYT also observes the terms of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, signed in 2004.

Occasionally a source to replenish partners’ collections in cases of catastrophe, CIMMYT germplasm bank collections are most often used for the center’s own research and the work of others—each year CIMMYT typically ships more than 5,000 seed samples, in response to requests from hundreds of researchers in dozens of countries worldwide. The collections also furnish useful genes for resistance to diseases and pests of both crops, as well as tolerance to constraints such as drought or poor soils.

“The maize seed we sent to Svalbard included collections backed up at CIMMYT over the last 15 years, as part of a cooperative program to regenerate endangered seed from Latin American germplasm banks,” says Taba. The wheat shipment to the vault comprised samples from collections regenerated over the past two years, according to Payne. “We’ll continue sending back-ups of regenerated collections to Svalbard each year, until the entire CIMMYT maize and wheat stores are represented in the vault holdings,” says Payne.