Climate change threatens to reduce global crop production, and poor people in tropical environments will be hit the hardest. More than 90% of CIMMYT’s work relates to climate change, helping farmers adapt to shocks while producing more food, and reduce emissions where possible. Innovations include new maize and wheat varieties that withstand drought, heat and pests; conservation agriculture; farming methods that save water and reduce the need for fertilizer; climate information services; and index-based insurance for farmers whose crops are damaged by bad weather. CIMMYT is an important contributor to the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security.
In Morogoro, a drought-prone area in Tanzania, farmers are using certified maize seed and urging other farmers to grow a new drought tolerant variety, TAN 250, which they say is like “an insurance against hunger and total crop failure, even under hot, dry conditions like those of recent years.”
CIMMYT is adapting an advanced technology—the doubled haploid approach—to develop inbred lines of tropical maize for sub-Saharan Africa. It promises to reduce costs and speed the arrival of better-adapted maize for resource-poor farmers in the world’s toughest environments.
CIMMYT scientists have begun developing drought tolerant varieties of tropical maize for places like sub-Saharan Africa using a high-tech approach—known as doubled haploids—previously applied principally by commercial seed companies working mostly on temperate maize.
“Haploid” refers to the number of chromosomes in a reproductive cell, like sperm or ovum. In grasses like maize, the reproductive cells—pollen and ovules—contain half the chromosomes of a full-grown individual. Fertilization joins the genetic information from the two parents, and offspring carry paired sets of chromosomes, reflecting the diversity of each parent.
“Maize breeders working on hybrids—the most productive type of maize variety and the one marketed by most seed companies—must at some point create genetically-stable and pure lines of desirable, individual plants, for use as parents of hybrids,” says CIMMYT maize physiologist Jose Luis Araus. Conventionally, breeders get the lines by repeatedly fertilizing selected, individual maize plants with the plant’s own pollen. The process requires expensive field space, labor, and time—normally, seven or more generations, which represents at least three years, even in settings where it’s possible to grow two crops per season.
In the latter part of the 20th century, crop scientists developed a quicker, cheaper path to genetically-uniform parent lines—though a technically intricate method. The first step involves crossing normal maize with special maize types called “inducers,” whose pollen causes the normal maize to produce seed containing haploid embryos. The haploid embryo carries a single set of its own chromosomes, rather than the normal paired sets. The embryos are planted, and subsequent treatment of the seedlings with a particular chemical causes them to make “photocopies” of their haploid chromosomes, resulting in a fertile plant endowed with a doubled set of identical chromosomes and able to produce seed of 100% genetic purity. “The actual treatment, as well as getting from the embryo to a reasonable amount of seed of the pure line, is very complicated,” says Ciro Sánchez Rodríguez, CIMMYT technician in charge of doubled haploid field trials, “but when the process is perfected, it only takes two generations—about one year—and the logistical advantages are tremendous.”
CIMMYT is implementing the doubled haploid technology on a research station in Mexico, using drought tolerant plants adapted to sub-Saharan Africa. “CIMMYT’s use of the practice is another example of how we put advanced technologies at the service of disadvantaged, small-scale farmers,” says Araus. “Among other things, this represents a significant opportunity to increase the availability of improved, drought tolerant maize varieties for sub-Saharan Africa,” he says.
Commercial seed companies in Europe and North America have been the main users of the doubled haploid technology, and the inducer genotypes available are of temperate adaptation. “The inducers perform very poorly in the tropical conditions of our Mexico stations,” says Vanessa Prigge, a PhD student from the University of Hohenheim working at CIMMYT to perfect the technique. To generate inducers that work better in tropical settings, Prigge and colleagues are crossing temperate inducers from Hohenheim with CIMMYT maize from Mexico, Kenya, and Zimbabwe. “We expect to have tropical versions of the inducers in a couple years,” she says.
Maize lines from this work will be used initially in the Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa (DTMA) and the Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) projects.
“This is a very exciting technology,” says Aida Kebede, an Ethiopian PhD student from Hohenheim helping to establish the doubled haploid technology at CIMMYT. “It holds the key to addressing more quickly the persistent problems of African maize growers: drought, disease pressure, and low productivity. I’m happy to contribute!”
CIMMYT fosters regional partnerships and provides seed to help researchers in Thailand get drought resistant maize to farmers.
“We are very, very dry,” says farmer Yupin Ruanpeth. “Last year we had a drought at flowering time and we lost a lot of yield.” In fact, she explains, during the last five years, her family’s farm has suffered from severe drought three times in a row. The soil is good and in a year with no drought they can harvest five tons of maize per hectare, but last year they could only harvest three tons per hectare.
Geographically, the Thai province of Nakhon Sawan lies only a short drive from lush lowland paddy fields, but it seems a world away. In this region the rainy season (between May and September) brings enough water for a single crop, usually of maize or cassava, and in the dry season the fields lie fallow. Almost all maize in Thailand is rainfed, grown under similar conditions
At the Thai Department of Agriculture’s Nakhon Sawan Field Crops Research Center, Pichet Grudloyma, senior maize breeder, shows off the drought screening facilities. Screening is carried out in the dry season, so that water availability can be carefully controlled in two comparison plots: one well-watered and one “drought” plot, where watering is stopped for two weeks before and two weeks after flowering. Many of the experimental lines and varieties being tested this year are here as the result of the Asian Maize Network (AMNET). Funded by the Asian Development Bank, this CIMMYT-led project has brought together scientists from the national maize programs of five South East Asian countries to develop drought tolerant maize varieties and deliver them to farmers.
“We already have two releases under AMNET,” explains Grudloyma. These are varieties produced by the national maize program, focusing prior to AMNET on resistance to the disease downy mildew, which have also proved themselves under drought screening. The first, Nakhon Sawan 2, was released in 2006. The second, experimental hybrid NSX 042029, has been popular in farmer participatory trials and with local seed companies, and is slated for release in 2008. “This is the best hybrid we have,” says Grudloyma with pride. “It’s drought tolerant, disease resistant, and easy to harvest by hand.” The two hybrids incorporate both CIMMYT and Thai breeding materials, a legacy of Thailand’s long relationship with the Center.
In current work under AMNET, the Thai breeders are crossing lines from the national breeding program with new drought tolerant materials provided each year by CIMMYT. “We screen for drought tolerance in the dry season and downy mildew resistance in the rainy season, and take the best materials forward each year,” explains Grudloyma. “We now have many promising hybrids coming though.”
Funding from the project has also had a big impact on the team’s capacity to screen those hybrids. “We had a small one to two hectare facility before; now we have four hectares with a perfect controlled-irrigation system. Because we’ve been in AMNET, we have good varieties and good fieldwork and screening capacity. This is leading to other projects, for example we’re currently working with GCP [the Generation Challenge Program].” Thailand has also taken on a role in seed distribution, receiving and sharing seed from the AMNET member countries, and testing the varieties on the drought screening plots at the Research Center.
For Grudloyma, this collaborative approach is a big change. “We’ve learned a lot and gained a lot from our friends in different countries. We each have different experiences, and when we share problems we can adapt knowledge from others to our own situations.”
The Thai researchers can come up with many examples of things they have learned from their AMNET partners. “We saw the very friendly relationships between a number of seed companies and the Vietnam team, and we tried to modify the way we worked in Thailand,” says Grudloyma. “This year we shared promising hybrids with seed companies before release. Before that we just worked with farmers and small seed producers, and the seed companies could buy seed after varieties were released.” The result has been wider distribution of new drought tolerant varieties: this year the group received orders for enough parental materials for NSX 042029 to produce 300 tons of seed.
“We learned how to evaluate farmer preferences better from the Philippines team,” adds Amara Traisiri, an entomologist working on responding to these preferences. “We now use their method in all our field trials with farmers and we’re getting a more accurate picture of what farmers want.” This information caused the group to include ease of hand harvest as another trait to consider in their breeding program, after realizing how important it is to farmers. And the learning continued at this month’s annual regional training meeting. “Today, we learned a system for farmer participatory trials,” says Grudloyma, referring to a session on planning and analyzing trial data from CIMMYT maize breeder Gary Atlin. “With these new ideas to direct us we’ll be able to get better results.”
Almost all Thai maize farmers grow improved hybrid varieties, and for Ruanpeth, her priorities are clear. “Drought tolerance is very important”, she says, and dismisses other traits, such as yellow color. “No, I want varieties that are drought tolerant.” She likes to try the latest hybrids and has grown more than 10 commercial varieties. She eagerly accepts the suggestion from Grudloyma’s team to try their new hybrids on a small area this year.
The project has built capacity and relationships that will endure, according to Grudloyma. “Our station is now very good at working with drought,” he says, “and we’ll continue cooperation and providing germplasm. We already have plans for collaboration with China and Vietnam.” CIMMYT’s role in providing germplasm and access to new knowledge and technologies has been vital, as has its leadership. “It’s very hard to get hold of germplasm from anywhere except CIMMYT,” says Grudloyma. “It’s also difficult to come together: we needed an international organization to coordinate and facilitate regional interaction. With CIMMYT everything is easier.”
For more information: Kevin Pixley (k.pixley@cgiar.org)
A new experiment, using precision water control, gives hard data about the gains that can be made growing wheat under zero-tillage conditions.
This was a classic showdown. On the right one hundred wheat lines (from the 14th and 15th International Semi-Arid Wheat Yield Trials) planted in the conventional way on tilled soil. On the left an identical one hundred wheat lines, but this time planted without tillage into the residue of a zero-tilled sorghum crop (the field had previously been tilled normally). The objective? To determine which cropping method would give the best results under different water conditions. Biggest yield wins.
When the team at the CIMMYT experimental station near Obregón in northwest Mexico planted the two identical sets of seeds, they had high hopes that they would find significant differences. This relatively straightforward experiment was designed by CIMMYT rainfed wheat breeder Yann Manes. It took advantage of the fact that it rarely rains during the growing season at Obregón, so precision irrigation could be used to simulate various rainfall conditions. Manes expected the zero-tillage field would give higher yields when there was water stress but he needed to prove it. “The stubble from the sorghum should help the soil retain water,” says Manes. “But this was the real test. No one had actually done the zero-tillage face off under different but carefully-controlled water conditions on a large set of wheat varieties.”
The two plots were divided into three strips, each one receiving a different, carefully-controlled amount of water. They used what the Obregón teams calls “the dinosaur”, a fifty-meter-long, three-armed machine that can deliver water precisely to each growing row, simulating rainfall. One set of plants in each plot received a normal amount of water (320 mm). The middle strip was water-stressed, receiving a reduced amount of water (175 mm), and the last strip in each plot was grown under drought-like conditions, receiving only 105 mm of water during the whole growing season.
As the wheat approached maturity, some differences started to appear in the two plots. Manes was pretty excited. “You can see there is a difference in biomass,” he says. “Look here to the left, in the drought-stressed wheat on the zero-tillage side there is more than in the same strip on the right.”
But biomass and yield are not the same thing. What if the wheat plants under zero-tillage conditions just made bigger leaves and stalks but did not have larger or more grains in their spikes? The team had to wait until each strip was harvested and the results from all the lines, all the strips, and both plots were computed.
What the team found was that under normal rainfall conditions there were no appreciable differences in yield between the two plots. This reflects what has been seen in long-term trials of various tillage practices run in Obregón; that the advantage of zero over normal tillage starts to show only after four or five years. But under water stress conditions, it was a totally different story. Under both reduced-water conditions and simulated drought there was an average yield advantage of between 8 and 9% to the wheats on the zero-tillage side. Zero-tillage wins, plows down.
Samples taken during the crop cycle confirmed that zero-tilled soil held moisture better than conventionally-tilled soil in this experiment. The data also gave other interesting insights into how different wheats respond to drought conditions as well as to the cropping practice, and Manes says that opens the door to a whole new line of research—determining whether you get different results in breeding when you make your selections from zero-tillage rather than conventional plots.
The work was done in collaboration with CIMMYT’s agronomy team led by Ken Sayre, who analyzed the soil samples, and with Jose Crossa, from the Crop Research Informatics Laboratory (CRIL), who did the statistical analysis.
Manes cautions that this is just one season of data. He intends to repeat the experiment again next year, and in the meantime former CIMMYT breeder Richard Trethowan is doing a similar experiment in Australia.
Manes cautions that this is just one season of data. He intends to repeat the experiment again next year, and in the meantime former CIMMYT breeder Richard Trethowan is doing a similar experiment in Australia.
“I think next season the results might be even better,” says an optimistic Manes. “The soil will have had another year of zero-tillage, with more organic residue available to hold water. At least that is what I would expect. Of course, I won’t know until I try it.”
For more information: Yann Manes, rainfed wheat breeder (y.manes@cgiar.org)
Donors and farmers agree – Project gets high marks for important work
The Africa Maize Stress project (AMS), in which CIMMYT is a key partner, was termed “A flagship project” in a recently completed review. A three-member panel from the German Corporation for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) spent the week from 24 February–1 March with AMS staff and partners, to assess the performance of the project’s work from 2003-20005 and make recommendations for its future direction. Two of the six days were spent on field visits to the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute’s (KARI) Embu Center, one of the project’s major maize breeding sites; Bar Sauri Millennium Village, a beneficiary of AMS maize varieties; and Western Seed Company, a local seed enterprise that is multiplying and marketing the varieties.
Team leader, Dr. Manfed van Eckert, said the reviewers saw in AMS, qualities that could serve as a model for similar multi-faceted projects in Africa. Among these were the “excellent working relations with national partners, and the Eastern and Central African Maize and Wheat (ECAMAW) Research Network.”
The review congratulated CIMMYT maize breeder and AMS project coordinator Alpha Diallo for his management of the complex, multi-donor funded, partnership project. AMS is supported by Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), and the Rockefeller Foundation, and works with national agricultural research systems (NARS), NGOs and seed companies in 10 eastern and central African countries.
Review team member Jeffrey Luhanga commented that all too often breeders’ improved varieties “sit on the shelf for lack of solid partnerships with the seed sector. But this project’s successes are having a direct bearing on household nutrition, and especially on weanling children, among the most vulnerable people in Sub-Saharan Africa.” The dramatic quadrupling of maize yields recorded in 2005 at the Sauri Millennium village illustrates the point.
“The program has gone to the grassroots level; it is benefiting the people of Africa. Congratulations!” said van Eckert.
The Africa Maize Stress project is developing maize varieties that are tolerant to drought, low soil fertility, Striga weed, and endemic pests and diseases (maize streak virus, blight, and grey leaf spot), and is working with local partners to ensure that these varieties reach resource-poor farmers in its mandate regions. The project’s current phase is stepping up the development of imidazolinone-resistant (IR) maize varieties for Striga weed control, and quality protein maize (QPM) suited for African ecologies.
The GTZ team recommended that in its next phase, AMS advance current activities, but also broaden its geographical horizons, through strategic partnerships in “…war-torn areas in Southern Sudan and Somalia,” and “investigate sustainable financing options for maize breeding programs in the region.”
Other partners in the project include the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and national research programs like KARI in Kenya.
For more information contact Alpha Diallo (a.diallo@cgiar.org)
East Africa is struggling with the worst drought in more than half a century. In Kenya, a lack of supply has pushed food prices to dangerously high levels.
In June 2010, a 90-kilogram bag of maize – the primary food for most Kenyans – cost $16. By July 2011 the same bag was $44 – a 160% increase.
Half of the people in the region live on less than $2 a day and spend about half their income on food. The rising price of staple foods has tragic consequences for the poor who must simply make do with less, or do without.
There is hope for East Africans, even in the midst of drought. CIMMYT (The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center) has developed varieties of maize seed bred specifically for dry conditions.
Meet Philip Ngolania, an ex-schoolteacher and current maize farmer who planted the new seeds this February.
Other resources on drought tolerant maize:
A two-day workshop on potential technologies and policy environments for smallholder rainfed maize farming systems of Jharkhand state, India was organized jointly by Birsa Agriculture University (BAU), CIMMYT, and the International Plant Nutrition Institute (IPNI) during 16-17 April, 2012 at Ranchi, Jharkhand, India. The outcomes of the workshop will form part of CIMMYT’s IFAD-funded project on “Sustainable Intensification of Smallholder Maize-Livestock Farming Systems in Hill Areas of South Asia” and the MAIZE CGIAR Research Program (CRP).
There were 69 participants in total, including scientists, extension agents (KVKs), and students from BAU; key officials from the state department of agriculture National Food Security Mission (NFSM); and scientists from IPNI, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), and CIMMYT. The workshop was inaugurated by BAU vice chancellor M.P. Pandey, while sessions and break-out group discussions were facilitated by Kaushik Majumdar, director of IPNI’s South Asia Program; JS Choudhary, state NFSM director; AK Sarkar, dean of the College of Agriculture at BAU; ILRI scientist Nils Teufel; CIMMYT scientists M. L. Jat and Surabhi Mittal; and IPNI deputy director T. Satyanarayana.
The workshop was made up of presentations on key topics, break-out group discussions, and a brainstorming session. The overall key themes were: (1) current status, constraints, and opportunities in different regions of Jharkhand , (2) conservation agriculture in maize and wheat systems, (3) approaches for crop-livestock integration, (4) integrated farming systems for food and nutritional security, (5) optimizing nutrient management for improved yield and profitability, and (6) approaches for inclusive growth for Jharkhand.
The five break-out groups discussed conservation agriculture (CA); site-specific nutrient management (SSNM); integrated farming systems and crop livestock interactions; enabling policies; and knowledge gaps, partnerships, networks and scaling-out strategies. The discussion outcomes were particularly focused on technology targeting and enabling environments and policies.
Agriculture in Jharkhand is at very low cropping intensity (~114%), despite good rainfall in most districts. The most critical issues include: rolling topography with very small holdings, leading to severe erosion due to lack of appropriate rainwater harvesting; soil acidity; lack of high-yielding stress-tolerant cultivars; very limited mechanization; and poor farmer access to inputoutput markets, coupled with resource poverty.
Building on the experience of CIMMYT’s hill maize project in the state, the participants agreed that optimizing cropping systems deploying CA practices could alleviate many of these problems, and sustainably increase crop production and productivity. Integrating CA with SSNM has shown promising results in improving nutrient use efficiency, currently another bottleneck in productivity gains due to inappropriate nutrient use. Crop-livestock integration is also key, as animals dominate farming in Jharkhand.
To implement these technologies and practices on a large scale, policy support is crucial. The outcomes of the workshop are being documented to serve as a policy paper for prioritization and implementation of technologies by the state, with the goal of arresting land degradation, improving crop productivity, and improving resource use efficiency and farm profitability.
The collaborative nature of the Seeds of Discovery (SeeD) initiative was highlighted at a seminar on 12th July, with Hans Braun, director of CIMMYT’s Global Wheat Program, calling for an “open and frank conversation” between associates. The 25 participants, from CIMMYT and the National Institute of Forestry, Agriculture, and Livestock Research (INIFAP) gathered at El Batán for a working meeting coordinated by Carolina Saint-Pierre, Genetic Resource Phenotyping Coordinator, CIMMYT, to discuss the development of collaborative projects for wheat phenotyping within SeeD, one of the four components of the Sustainable Modernization of Traditional Agriculture (MasAgro) project.
In the opening session, SeeD coordinator Peter Wenzl highlighted how collaborations within the SeeD initiative will be vital to the success of the project: “CIMMYT is unable to conduct all the work on its own,” says Wenzl. Besides alliances with INIFAP and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), the SeeD initiative will also collaborate with the James Hutton Institute (UK) on data management and DArT P/L (Australia) on molecular characterization of genebank accessions through the establishment of an agricultural genetic-analysis service in Mexico (“Servicio de Análisis Genético para la Agricultura” in Spanish).
The SeeD initiative hopes that by comprehensively studying and classifying the genotypes of seed collections, important information on the global biodiversity of maize and wheat can be made available worldwide. Wenzl says they “want to build a Google for genetic resources”.
Within this context, the ‘phenotypic characterization’ aims to discover how the plants withstand real field conditions. Evaluating plant performance for different traits and in different environments is crucial to understanding the information coded in plant genomes. It also enables further information to be gained regarding the genetic resources that affect the ability of plants to withstand climate change and resource scarcity.
This identification of novel genetic resources for plant breeding will not only benefit Mexico; “this particular project should be a project of Mexico to the world,” says Wenzl. It is an ambitious goal but one that it is hoped can be achieved through collaborators sharing research methodologies and combining their efforts. INIFAP and CIMMYT used the working meeting to begin this process by identifying joint work modules to address the challenges for wheat improvement, such as increasing wheat tolerance to heat, drought, and diseases.
The US government has temporarily satisfied its hunger for information on how to adapt agriculture to climate change. On 14 September 2009, Matthew Reynolds, CIMMYT wheat physiologist, joined around 15 other agriculture experts just outside of Washington, DC, USA, to present at a conference titled: “Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change: What Will It Take?”
The conference, sponsored by the US Department of State, opened with a keynote by John Holdren, science adviser to the President of the United States, and was followed by four main panel topics: Impacts of Climate Change on Agriculture; Research in the Public Sector; Research in the Private Sector; and Alternative Crops, Sustainable Management, and Integrative Strategies. The goal of the event was to explore strategies and raise awareness about adaption measures that are required—or will be required in the future—to maintain sufficient global food production.
“It is reassuring to know that the US government is taking the issue of food security in the context of climate change seriously,” said Reynolds, who presented on adapting the major cereal crops (including maize and wheat) to climate change. “The State Department was not the only government program represented at the conference; the broad spectrum of speakers and government officials (including USDA and USAID) present shows that they are considering a comprehensive approach to the issue.”
A position paper based on the outcomes of the conference will be prepared for the US government. It will also be published in Science magazine.
Former CIMMYT Wheat Program director, Tony Fischer, has won the 2007 Farrer Memorial Medal, an annual award established in 1911 to perpetuate the memory of famous Australian wheat rust researcher William Farrer and to encourage and inspire agricultural scientists.
In announcing the award, Farrer Memorial Trust Chairman Barry Buffier described Tony as the preeminent Australian crop physiologist of his generation. Tony’s main interest throughout his carrier has been wheat yield under both dry and well-watered conditions, with the goal of applying physiological knowledge to wheat improvement through breeding and agronomy. He has published more than 120 scientific publications, including several papers drawing on data from his own property in southern NSW where he kept crop, soil and climatic records for more than 40 years.
Tony received his medal in August at a ceremony in Canberra held to coincide with the Crawford fund 2007 Conference. He then delivered the 2007 Farrer Memorial Oration.
Building on a long, fruitful partnership, on 04 December 2007 in Beijing the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science (CAAS) and CIMMYT signed an agreement for a new, three-year, collaborative wheat breeding program. The chief aim is to develop new cultivars with resistance to stem rust and other diseases, as well as adaptation to climate change, particularly tolerance to heat and drought. According to the agreement, participants will draw upon modern methods such as genomics, marker-assisted selection, and informatics systems. Efforts will focus in part on developing varieties that resist Ug99, a deadly new strain of stem rust that is virulent for most current wheat cultivars and appears to be moving steadily from its point of original sighting, in eastern Africa, toward the major wheat farming areas of the Middle East and South Asia.
Takashi Kumashiro (Director, Biological Resources Division) and Kazuo Nakashima (Senior Scientist, Biotechnology Lab of Dr. Yamaguchi-Shinozaki) from the Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences (JIRCAS) visited CIMMYT during 29-30th November for the first mid-year year review meeting of a new five year project funded by the Japanese Ministry of Fisheries and Food (MAFF).
The project is the second phase of a JIRCAS-CGIAR collaborative initiative to develop transgenic drought tolerance in a range of tropical staple crops—an initiative launched by Masa Iwanaga when he was Director of the Biological Resources Division of JIRCAS. The current project involves the use of a second generation of drought responsive elements (DREB genes) generated by JIRCAS scientists and other transgenes (especially transcription factors) generated by the Gene Discovery Research Team of the Plant Science Center of the RIKEN Yokohama Institute. Led by GREU director Jonathan Crouch, the current project is a joint wheat and rice initiative through collaborations between CIMMYT, CIAT and IRRI.
A new drought screening site at the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) station in Kiboko, Kenya, is nearly ready for its first planting. Kiboko is located about 140 km south east of Nairobi on the main road to Mombassa and the Tsavo National Park. When completed the new 16-hectare field will be used to plant trials to select new drought-tolerant maize lines as part of the Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa initiative (DTMA). Site manager, Anthony Karuku, says he expects to have work at the site completed soon, with all the fencing, a perimeter road, and sprinkler irrigation in place and the site ready for planting by late November.
The first maize planting will be used to map soil fertility and look for problems of this or any other type. The new site significantly increases the amount of land available to the DTMA to screen for drought tolerance in maize.
Anthony Karuku with Stephen Mugo
Faced with rapidly degrading soils and dwindling water supplies, Mexican farmers and researchers have sought with renewed vigor in recent years to apply conservation agriculture principles—reduced tillage, retention of crop residues, and relevant rotations. CIMMYT has long supported Mexico’s efforts in conservation agriculture, both in basic research and in its applications.
As part of a traveling seminar organized by the “Asociación para la Agricultura Sostenible en base a Siembra Directa” (the Association for Sustainable Agriculture based on Direct Seeding, ASOSID), headquartered in Mexico’s El Bajío region, 32 farmer members and 7 researcher/extensionists visited CIMMYT’s Toluca and El Batán research stations during 6- 7 September 2007 to learn how conservation agriculture can be pursued in rainfed, highland environments.
At Toluca the group saw first-hand the work of superintendent Fernando Delgado, who is applying zero-tillage with residue retention on the station and assisting maize farmers of the Toluca Valley in adopting the practices. Early the following morning the group visited the long-term conservation agriculture trial begun at El Batán in 1991, for a presentation and discussion with Nele Verhulst, PhD student from the KULeuven, Belgium, and Chilean student Andrea Chocobar Guerra, working at CIMMYT on her MSc thesis.
The Association was launched in 2002, with support from CIMMYT and several Mexican organizations working in conservation agriculture at the time. According to ASOSID Technical Coordinator, Óscar Contreras Mejía (photo inset above), early efforts to disseminate conservation agriculture in El Bajío went fast, trying to reach as many farmers as possible.
“Things are going a bit slower now—we’re consolidating the technical side,” he says. Now roughly 80% of the area of participating farmers is under zero-tillage.”
Contreras cites as two major technical challenges the introduction of crop rotations in El Bajío, a central Mexico breadbasket where irrigated monoculture has dominated, and managing the large amounts of crop residues that are produced.
“Those could easily be sold for forage, but because we have problems of diminishing soil organic matter, we want to keep residues on the field,” Contreras explains.
Reflecting emerging circumstances in many intensive, irrigated cropping regions of the developing world, Mexico’s El Bajío is facing mounting problems relating, among other things, to improper use of agrochemicals and water. A recent report in the Mexican daily “El Sol de México” said the water table in the state of Guanajuato, in El Bajío, is falling at a rate of 1-3 meters per year. Conservation agriculture provides one avenue for addressing these problems.
The Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa (DTMA) team held its first project review and planning meeting from 3-7 September in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. During the first three days, staff from CIMMYT and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), together with the project’s advisory board and representatives from the donor, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, documented work completed during the first 9 months of the project. The reports covered everything from breeding trials to molecular techniques, seed systems, and livelihoods surveys.
Maize is arguably sub-Saharan Africa’s most important food crop. Erratic and unpredictable rains in many maize-growing regions of Africa have resulted in major crop failures. The DTMA project is working to improve the performance of maize in low-rainfall seasons, giving resource-poor maize farmers a better chance during times of drought.
National project partners joined for the last two days of the meeting to discuss their accomplishments and help set future priorities. In total nearly 60 researchers from Africa and Mexico participated in the meeting. One thing that was clear was the close cooperation and coordination between the CIMMYT and IITA maize programs. In fact Paula Bramel, Deputy DG, Research for Development (shown in photo, left), thanked CIMMYT for inviting IITA to be a project partner and praised how well the partnership was working.
David Bergvinson, from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, called the DTMA a flagship project for the new agricultural development initiative of the Foundation.