funder_partner: CGIAR

CIMMYT E-News, vol 4 no. 8, August 2007

Zero-tillage trials in rainfed, winter wheat-fallow systems show smallholder farmers on the Anatolian Plains a way to double their harvests.

Muzzafer Avci is an agronomist with the Central Field Crops Research Institute of the Turkish Ministry of Agriculture. In recent years he has been working with CIMMYT wheat agronomist, Ken Sayre, and over time has become an advocate of zero-tillage—the direct seeding of a crop into the residues of a previous crop, without plowing—for rainfed winter wheat, a key crop for small-scale farmers on the Anatolian Plateau. On this day, he completes a drought impact forecast for the Ministry and drives the three hours east of Ankarato to the Ilci Cicekdagi farm, where the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Turkey has funded zero-tillage trials.

On the Anatolian Plateau, farms are typically less than 10 hectares in size. Wheat farmers obtain just a single harvest every second season from each field. Sowing takes place in autumn before the onset of winter. The wheat germinates quickly, lies dormant over the winter, and matures the following summer. After harvest the field is left fallow for a year before being sown to wheat again. During the fallow, farmers plow the weeds under two or three times. Even with the long fallow, which one would suppose helps conserve or improve soil fertility, typical wheat harvests on these farms reach only 2 tons per hectare, far below the crop’s genetic potential. Once highly productive, the winter wheat farming system has become more and more dependent on fertilizer as soils degrade, making it unsustainable.

Model farm showcases zero-tillage

A former state farm that was recently privatized, the Ilci Cicekdagi farm is not typical. It comprises 1,700 hectares and supports modern, diversified farming involving dairy and beef cattle, sheep, and many crops, among them wheat. The farm owner and managers believe they have a responsibility to assist less well-endowed, smallholder farmers in the area. So they hold demonstrations and field days for the local community. Farm manager Nedim Tabak says he hopes the farm will be a model for local farmers. He is proud of his zero-tillage trials and shows them off to Avci and to Carla Konsten, Agricultural Counselor from the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Ankara. The Netherlands, Canada, and Australia have funded pilot zero-tillage work in Turkey for the past two years and representatives of those countries’ funding agencies are pleased with the result. “This technology will clearly benefit farmers on the Anatolian Plateau,” says Avci, who learned about zero-tillage first-hand at a CIMMYT course on the topic.

Retired agronomist Mufit Kalayci, recently brought back to the Anatolian Agricultural Research Center in Eskisiher, Turkey, to mentor a new team, sees the value of zero-tillage in intensive, irrigated systems with more than a single crop per year, but is skeptical about using it with traditional rainfed wheat farms. “I don’t think you can retain enough moisture over the fallow period.” he says. For that reason, one of the goals of the zero-tillage experiment was to see if a second crop other than weeds could be grown during the fallow season. This question will be answered in coming years.

Zero-tillage: A lot to like

Of course, use of zero-tillage and retaining crop residues on the soil do more than simply capture and hold soil moisture. The practices reduce production costs and diesel fuel burning, and help prevent topsoil erosion from the strong winds that often sweep the Plateau during fallow. The elimination of repeated tillage to bury weeds also helps retain soil structure, aiding aeration and water filtration. The zero-tillage trials have obtained demonstration yields of more than 4 tons per hectare—double what farmers currently get.

Farm manager Tabak says his trials were sown late for lack of timely access to a zero-tillage seeder. He is planning to modify one of the seeders on the farm for next season. Already some local farmers have looked at his test plots and said they will try zero-tillage too next season.

For more information: Julie Nicol, Wheat Nematologist (j.nicol@cgiar.org)

CIMMYT E-News, vol 3 no. 8, August 2006

A radio program in Nepal brings information to farmers in a language they understand.

It’s Monday, 6:30 pm on Radio Birgunj, the voice of the plains in Southeastern Nepal. Fans for kilometers in all directions huddle by their radios to listen—not to a soap opera or pop music, but to a show about bed planting, horticulture, and zero-tillage. The weekly radio show on farming, targeted specifically to rural inhabitants, is one component of a project funded by CABI to introduce and promote resource-conserving technologies to the region’s rice and wheat farmers.

Radio is often the best way to reach rural families in developing countries, and farm shows broadcast from small community stations are not unusual. But Radio Birgunj broadcasts to a population of five million Nepalese, nearly all from farm families, and the station’s only “competition” is the region’s government radio network.

Ganesh Sah, head of the Nepal Agricultural Research Council (NARC) Agricultural Implement Research Center in Birgunj and long-time CIMMYT partner, is responsible for 70 programs since the show’s launch in January, 2005. “It’s been difficult coming up with a different topic each week, but we’ve managed with just a couple repeats,” he says. The program uses a question-and-answer format, with the station’s Anita Kumwar usually putting questions to an expert guest on behalf of farmers. The show uses the region’s indigenous language and music, attracting listeners and ensuring that messages are clearly understood.

“The program has been very effective,” says Paras Thakur, a farmer in the nearby village of Tripeni. He leads a community group that is experimenting with zero-tillage, a practice whereby crops are seeded directly into field residues without plowing. “I especially liked the show about vegetables.” Eight out of ten farmers in the group have radios and listen to the broadcasts. In areas where radios are not so common, many people gather around a single radio for the show.

The program’s popularity has led the government of Nepal launch another radio farm show in the region. Is Sah worried about the competition? “Of course not: the more messages, the better,” he says. “Besides, the government program is in Nepalese, which is not the first language of Birgunj farm families.” The last show funded by the CABI project has been aired. But the project team has saved a small amount of money, so Sah hopes he and researchers from his center can hit the airwaves again soon with information to improve the livelihoods of thousands of farmers they could never meet in person.

Zero-tillage for growing wheat after rice saves water, diesel, and other inputs, and allows earlier sowing of wheat, which raises yields. The practice has been adopted by farmers on more than 2 million hectares in South Asia over the past six years. This is largely a result of work to test and promote zero-tillage and other resource-conserving practices by the Rice-Wheat Consortium for the Indo-Gangetic Plains, which includes the national agricultural research systems of Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan; several centers of the CGIAR with leadership from CIMMYT; and various advanced research institutes.

For more information contact Raj Gupta (r.gupta@cgiar.org)

CIMMYT E-News, vol 3 no. 10, October 2006

Improved maize makes a big difference in the lives of smallholder farmers on the slopes of Mt Kenya.

It’s 4:00 am and still pitch-black on the farm of Consolata Nyaga, but she is already busy at work. With nothing but the dim light of an oil lamp to guide her she carefully milks her two cows to be ready for the buyer who passes her house just before 5:00 every morning. She will get about a dollar for the three liters of milk, a profitable start to what will be a very long working day.

The milk cows are a very small part of her “garden”; a hectare and a quarter of land. She also grows some coffee, bananas, and beans. But what makes her farm work is the half hectare of improved maize she grows every season.

Consolata is a widow living alone, but her maize, a variety released by Kenya based on material from CIMMYT and the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI), feeds her and gives her the cash to put her 10 children through school. “This season I had thirteen bags” she proclaims. “Because it is my cash crop, I must sell and send the children to school.”

Neighbors are curious and come to field days on her farm to learn about the maize, which is not only a higher yielding variety but is also quality protein maize (QPM), meaning it has enhanced levels of the essential nutrient amino acids, lysine and tryptophan.

This is a part of Kenya where maize is not only a staple; it is the food people want to eat. Farmers store it inside their homes rather than in outside bins to prevent theft. “Actually any family that has no maize, has no food,” says Father Vincent Ireri, the Development Coordinator of the Diocese of Embu. “And anytime, even when we say as a country we have no food or there is famine, the implication is that there is no maize.” Ireri leads a team that works in conjunction with Catholic Relief Services, with farmers in the district to demonstrate the advantages of the new maize varieties.

CIMMYT and KARI have been working in this area to help farmers with maize varieties that are more drought-tolerant and insect resistant and under proper management give higher yields. Much of the work in this area has been funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). Consolata and the community group of which she is the treasurer have been quick to adopt the improved materials. Life seems to revolve around maize on Consolata’s small farm. In fact when she comes back from selling the milk each morning she immediately settles down to a hot mug of uji—a maize meal porridge. At midday she starts to prepare for the evening meal. She puts a mixture of maize and beans, called githeri, to boil on the cooking fire and then heads to her last unprepared field with a large hoe. No animal-drawn plow, just the power of one energetic maize farmer.

“Ah no! Let me tell you, if you eat potatoes and cabbages and eat rice, you cannot have energy to dig,” she says. “Yes, maize has got very big energy. You see somebody like myself after 56 years cannot dig unless you eat something good!”

Four hours later, and after a trip to the market to sell a bag of maize, dinner is ready. Neighbors, friends, and relatives have stopped by to enjoy the feast as the sun sets.

“Whenever, if I miss maize, I feel as if I am losing somehow,” Consolata says. “Maize is good. Maize is my favorite thing. And I like it. Yes.”

You can read more about the adoption of quality protein maize in the Embu district in the August E-news article The maize with the beans inside: QPM gathers a following in Kenya.

For more information contact Dennis Friesen (d.friesen@cgiar.org)

CIMMYT E-News, vol 4 no. 5, May 2007

No need to dig for ancient seeds to discover how and when maize moved from its ancestral home in Mesoamerica to become one of the world’s most widely-sown and popular food crops. New work by gene sleuths from CIMMYT and numerous maize growing countries solves the puzzle using DNA of present-day maize.

How did a crop domesticated some 7,000 years ago from a humble Mexican grass called teosinte become the number-one food crop in Africa and Latin America, and a major food, feed, and industrial crop just about everywhere else?

The incredible story of maize has been told in books, but there have always been lingering doubts, unanswered questions. If, for example, as records show, in 1493 Columbus brought maize to Spain from his visit to the warm climes and long days of the Caribbean, how is it that reliable accounts have the crop being grown in 1539 in the cold, short daylengths of Germany? That’s only 46 years later, and far too soon for such a radical adaptation in tropical maize. In another case, maize was supposedly brought to African countries like Nigeria by Portuguese colonists, but the local names for maize in that country are of Arabic derivation, suggesting that the crop likely arrived via Arabic-speaking traders.

Deciphering the history in genes

Recent work by CIMMYT and partners sheds new light on maize’s global migration. With support from Generation, a Challenge Program of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, and in collaboration with nine research institutes on four continents, scientists have used DNA markers—molecular signposts for genes of interest—and new approaches to analyze nearly 900 populations of maize and teosinte from around the world. “What is emerging is a far clearer picture of the crop’s global diversity and the pathways that led to it,” says CIMMYT molecular geneticist and leader of the effort, Marilyn Warburton.

Phase I of the work was funded by PROMAIS, a European maize consortium, and focused on North America and Europe. The Generation Challenge Program commissioned Phase II, which featured global coverage and brought the number of maize populations studied to 580. In Phase III, partners are adding another 300 populations of maize and teosinte, to fill any geographical gaps. A primary objective is to gather samples of landraces—local varieties developed through centuries of farmer selection—and ensure their conservation in germplasm banks. The diversity studies apply a method developed by Warburton for using DNA markers on bulk samples of individuals from large, heterogeneous populations like those typical for maize.

The great divide: Temperate vs tropical maize

Among other things, the studies corroborate the notion that northern European maize originates from North American varieties brought to the continent several decades after Columbus’ returned, and definitely not from tropical genotypes. “The two main modern divisions of maize arose about 3,000 years ago,” says Warburton, “as maize arrived in what is now the southwestern US and, at about the same time, on the islands of the Caribbean. Temperate maize spread further north and east across North America, while tropical maize spread south. The temperate-tropical division remains today. What maintains it are differences in disease susceptibility and photosensitivity—essentially, how daylength affects flowering time. The two maize types are now so different from each other that they do not cross well, and their hybrids are not well adapted anywhere.”

The work continues and, in addition to elucidating the epic journey of maize, will help breeders to home in on and more effectively use traits like drought tolerance from the vast gene pool of maize.

The above report is largely based on a longer description of this work, “Tracing history’s maize,” that appears in Generation’s “Partner and Product Highlights 2006.”

For more information: Marilyn Warburton, molecular geneticist (m.warburton@cgiar.org)

March, 2005

In March, CIMMYT scientists continued their pursuit of drought tolerant wheat with the second field trial of transgenic lines carrying the DREB gene, given to CIMMYT by Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences (JIRCAS). The gene, obtained from Arabidopsis thaliana, a relative of wild mustard, exhibited considerable promise in its initial field trial in 2004, and in earlier greenhouse trials (see September 2004 E-news). The project is funded by Australia’s Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) and is led by CIMMYT cell biologist Alessandro Pellegrineschi.

This second trial narrows the focus of investigation to four transgenic lines and uses a larger plot to ensure better control and analysis. It will also expose the experimental lines and control plants to both watered and drought conditions to determine their respective performance.

“In a few months when we get the results, we will follow the physiologists’ lead and see if this might be useful for producing hardy wheat for farmers in climates prone to drought,” says Pellegrineschi. He is particularly interested in identifying the promoter gene that switches on the drought response.

For further information, contact Alessandro Pellegrineschi (a.pellegrineschi@cgiar.org).

CIMMYT E-News, vol 4 no. 1, January 2007

Farmers and community leaders in Kenya’s most densely-populated region have organized to produce and sell seed of a maize variety so well-suited for smallholders that distant peers in highland Nepal have also selected it.

According to Paul Okong’o, retired school teacher and leader of Technology Adoption through Research Organizations (TATRO), Ochur Village, Western Kenya, farmers first disliked the maize whose seed he and group members are producing. “It has small grains, and they thought this would reduce its market value,” he explains. “But when you sowed the seed, which looked small, what came out of it was not small!”

Small-scale maize farmers of the Regional Agricultural Association Group (RAAG), another community-based organization in Western Kenya, have quintupled their yields in only one year—now obtaining more than 2 tons of maize grain per hectare—using seed, fertilizer, and training from TATRO, according to RAAG coordinator, David Mukungu. “This has meant that, besides having enough to eat, farmers were able to sell something to cover children’s school fees or other expenses,” says Mukungu. “We started with six farmers the first year, but after other farmers saw the harvest, the number using the improved seed and practices increased to thirty, and we expect it will continue increasing.”

The variety whose seed TATRO grows is called Kakamega Synthetic-I. It is an open-pollinated variety—a type often preferred over hybrids by cash-strapped smallholders, because they can save grain from the harvest and sow it as seed the following year, without losing its high yield or other desirable traits. The variety is also drought tolerant, matures earlier than other local varieties, and is better for making Kenyan’s favorite starchy staple, ugali. “Women say it ‘pulls’ the water, which means you don’t need much maize flour to make a good, heavy ugali,” Okong’o explains. “These things seem small, but when taken together they weigh a lot for farmers who eat ugali as a daily staple.”

A maize that crosses many borders

Kakamega Synthetic-I was released by the KARI research station in Kakamega, Kenya. Its pedigree traces back to the work of CIMMYT and many partners in southern and eastern Africa—national maize research programs, private companies, and non-government organizations—to develop stress tolerant maize for the region’s smallholders. “Kakamega Synthetic I was selected from ZM621, a long-season, drought tolerant, open-pollinated variety now released in several African countries,” says Marianne Bänziger, CIMMYT maize physiologist who took part in the creation of ZM621 and now serves as director of the center’s Global Maize Program. “The variety has also been released in Nepal, after small-scale farmers from the mid-hills chose it as one of their favorites in participatory varietal trials.” Bänziger says. This highlights the role of a global organization like CIMMYT, which can draw upon and distribute public goods and expertise transcending national borders: “The center was predicated upon and has practiced collaborative science ‘globalization’ for agricultural development since its inception four decades ago—long before that term became fashionable in policy circles.”

Finding and filling entrepreneurial niches

By reducing risk for small-scale farmers, varieties like Kakamega Synthetic-I encourage investment in other amendments, like fertilizer, that can start smallholders on an upward spiral out of low-input, subsistence agriculture. Good varieties also entice enterprising farmers and community-based organizations like TATRO into potentially profitable businesses like seed production, for niches inadequately served by existing companies. “We observe the seed production regulations of the KEPHIS, the Kenyan plant health inspectorate, and would like to work toward certification of our organization, to be able to sell certified seed in labeled packages and fetch better prices,” says Okong’o. TATRO is currently producing and marketing just under 2 tons of Kakamega Synthetic-I—enough to sow more than 70 hectares—each year. The lack of effective informal seed production and distribution systems limits the spread of improved open pollinated maize varieties and farming practices in eastern Africa, according to Stephen Mugo. CIMMYT maize breeder in the region, Mugo also coordinated the former, Rockefeller Foundation-funded project “Strengthening maize seed supply systems for small-scale farmers in Western Kenya and Uganda” that involved TATRO and similar farmer organizations. “Improved varieties raised yields in the past and could do so again,” he says, “but only about one-fifth of the region’s farmers grow improved varieties.”

For more information, Stephen Mugo, maize breeder (s.mugo@cgiar.org)

CIMMYT E-News, vol 3 no. 1, January 2006

A new DNA detection service provided by CIMMYT and KARI responds to African researchers’ calls for modern technology.

African maize breeders now have access to state-of-the-art biotechnology tools thanks to a service launched by CIMMYT and the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI). Housed within the laboratories at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) headquarters in Nairobi, under the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)-funded Biosciences Eastern and Central Africa (BECA) platform, the lab offers and trains researchers in the use of molecular marker techniques.

The molecular markers are DNA snippets that help researchers locate and select for genes associated with traits of interest, including resistance to pests and diseases, or tolerance to stresses like drought. With markers, breeders can cut the time and money needed to develop plant types that possess such useful traits. Until now, this capability had been unavailable to scientists in sub-Saharan Africa, outside of South Africa.

Led by CIMMYT biotechnologist Jedidah Danson and supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the service now has its hands full of requests from breeders working with CIMMYT, national agricultural research systems, local seed companies, and universities. “They’ve learnt of the service entirely through word-of-mouth,” she says. “It’s especially attractive because current funding allows us to offer the service free, so more breeders are exposed to the technology.”

Breeders using the service are especially interested in finding ways to incorporate resistance to maize streak virus, a disease endemic in much of sub-Saharan Africa and in enhancing the nutritional quality of herbicide tolerant maize, originally developed as part of a package to control the parasitic witch weed.

“Marker assisted selection is an important tool for breeders in Africa. CIMMYT and KARI must be lauded for being the first in the region to provide the service to public sector researchers,” says Richard Edema, molecular breeder at Makerere University, Uganda. Edema is also coordinator of the African Molecular Marker Application Network, a consortium of about 100 biotechnologists and breeders from across sub-Saharan Africa.

Danson is building a database of markers for genes for resistance to important pests and diseases, including maize streak virus, gray leaf spot, the parasitic weed Striga, and northern corn leaf blight. She also helps train breeders in the effective use of markers. “Clearly, our partnership to support African breeders was long overdue,” she says.

For more information contact Jedidah Danson (j.danson@cgiar.org)