Working with smallholders to understand their needs and build on their knowledge, CIMMYT brings the right seeds and inputs to local markets, raises awareness of more productive cropping practices, and works to bring local mechanization and irrigation services based on conservation agriculture practices. CIMMYT helps scale up farmers’ own innovations, and embraces remote sensing, mobile phones and other information technology. These interventions are gender-inclusive, to ensure equitable impacts for all.
This project will lead to the identification of genes of interest to help guide breeding efforts to boost yield stability and resilience in low fertility agriculture systems subject to drought.
Smallholder maize farmers in marginal environments in Asia are prone to drought due to either scanty/erratic rainfall or falling groundwater levels.
The Affordable, Accessible, Asian (AAA) Drought Tolerant Maize Project is a partnership among CIMMYT, the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, national agricultural research systems of Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam to develop drought-tolerant maize for smallholder farmers in Asia.
AAA combines complementary technologies and comparative advantages, such as CIMMYT’s global expertise in drought-tolerant maize breeding, Syngenta’s elite germplasm bred for Asia, the national partners’ local knowledge of farmers’ requirements and their germplasm testing network.
This project covers a gamut of upstream and downstream activities: marker discovery (genome-wide association studies); trait discovery (understanding root structure and function-lysimetrics); marker applications (genomic selection); drought phenotyping facilities (rhizotronics, rain-out shelters; managed drought stress screening locations); germplasm development; hybrid deployment; and linking with potential hybrid commercialization partners.
Objectives
Funding Institutions
Principal Coordinator
Bindiganavile Sampath Vivek
The Agricultural Innovation Program (AIP) for Pakistan is working to sustainably increase agricultural productivity and incomes in the agricultural sector through the promotion and dissemination of modern technologies/practices in the livestock, horticulture (fruits and vegetables) and cereals (wheat, maize and rice) sector. The CIMMYT-led project aims to foster emergence of a dynamic, responsive, and competitive system of science and innovation in Pakistan.
This unique project places particular emphasis on building partnerships between public research and those it serves, including farmers and the private sector. AIP operates through three activity windows: commissioned projects, a competitive grants system and human resource development. Within these activity windows AIP addresses complex agricultural systems, but is divided into four “science windows’” including cereals and cereal systems, livestock, vegetables and perennial horticulture. The key indicator of AIP’s success is the number of small farmers who adopt or benefit from productivity or value-enhancing technologies.
The long term goals of the project are food security, environmental protection, gender sensitization and poverty reduction through the adoption of sustainable technologies, resource management practices, advance agricultural models and improved systems.
Building resilience, self-reliance and a reliable business model
Intensive cereal cropping systems that include rice, wheat and/or maize are widespread throughout South Asia. These systems constitute the main economic activity in many rural areas and provide staple food for millions of people. The decrease in the rate of growth of cereal production, for both grain and residue, in South Asia is therefore of great concern. Simultaneously, issues of resource degradation, declining labor availability and climate variability pose steep challenges for achieving the goals of improving food security and rural livelihoods.
The Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA) was established in 2009 to promote durable change at scale in South Asia’s cereal-based cropping systems.
The project’s aim is to enhance the productivity of cereal-based cropping systems, increase farm incomes and reduce the environmental footprint of production through sustainable intensification technologies and management practices.
Operating in rural “innovation hubs” in Bangladesh, India and Nepal, CSISA complements regional and national efforts and involves public, civil society and private sector partners in the development and dissemination of improved cropping systems, resource-conserving management technologies, policies and markets. CSISA supports women farmers by ensuring their access and exposure to modern and improved technological innovations, knowledge and entrepreneurial skills that can help them become informed and recognized decision makers in agriculture.
The project is led by CIMMYT with partners the International Rice Research Institute and the International Food Policy Research Institute and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
On World Water day, researchers show how India’s farmers can beat water shortages and grow rice and wheat with 40 percent less water
India’s northwest region is the most important production area for two staple cereals: rice and wheat. But a growing population and demand for food, inefficient flood-based irrigation, and climate change are putting enormous stress on the region’s groundwater supplies. Science has now confronted this challenge: a “breakthrough” study demonstrates how rice and wheat can be grown using 40 percent less water, through an innovative combination of existing irrigation and cropping techniques. The study’s authors, from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), the Borlaug Institute for South Asia (BISA), Punjab Agricultural University and Thapar University, claim farmers can grow similar or better yields than conventional growing methods, and still make a profit.
The researchers tested a range of existing solutions to determine the optimal mix of approaches that will help farmers save water and money. They found that rice and wheat grown using a “sub-surface drip fertigation system” combined with conservation agriculture approaches used at least 40 percent less water and needed 20 percent less Nitrogen-based fertilizer, for the same amount of yields under flood irrigation, and still be cost-effective for farmers. Sub-surface drip fertigation systems involve belowground pipes that deliver precise doses of water and fertilizer directly to the plant’s root zone, avoiding evaporation from the soil. The proposed system can work for both rice and wheat crops without the need to adjust pipes between rotations, saving money and labor. But a transition to more efficient approaches will require new policies and incentives, say the authors.
Read the full story:
Innovative irrigation system could future-proof India’s major cereals. Thomsom Reuters Foundation News, 20 March 2019.
Read the study:
Sidhu HS, Jat ML, Singh Y, Sidhu RK, Gupta N, Singh P, Singh P, Jat HS, Gerard B. 2019. Sub-surface drip fertigation with conservation agriculture in a rice-wheat system: A breakthrough for addressing water and nitrogen use efficiency. Agricultural Water Management. 216:1 (273-283). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agwat.2019.02.019
The study received funding from the CGIAR Research Program on Wheat (WHEAT), the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and the Government of Punjab. The authors acknowledge the contributions of the field staff at BISA and CIMMYT based at Ludhiana, Punjab state.
The charlands, island-like tracts of land arising from riverbeds as a result of erosion and accretion, are home to millions of Bangladesh’s most vulnerable people. The lives of these people, much like the land itself, are exposed to nature’s forces such as erosion and floods.
In Eachlirchar, an area of charland in Lakkhitari Union, Gangachara, Rangpur district, where the soil struggles to yield even rice, the fate of the marginalized char community is arbitrarily determined by the course of nature. However, mother of three Anzuma Begam is living proof of the resilience and socioeconomic development catalyzed by adopting conservation agriculture-based sustainable intensification technologies.
Promoted by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) through its Sustainable and Resilient Farming Systems Intensification (SRFSI) project, sustainable intensification technologies have been heralded as a major breakthrough in the fight against charland aridity since 2014. By reducing drudgery, irrigation and costs, conservation agriculture enables the soil of the charlands to produce rice and maize yields consecutively.
Given its eventual success, it is surprising that the first phase of CIMMYT’s work in Eachlirchar did not run according to plan, as the tobacco-producing community did not welcome new technologies. Begam’s husband, Hossain Ali, even rejected her initial proposal to participate in the SRFSI project’s introductory training on zero tillage, weed management and new seeds. However, in spite of her husband’s disapproval and defying patriarchal constraints, Begam stepped forward to accept the new agricultural technology.
After engaging with the project, Begam decided apply conservation agriculture-based sustainable intensification practices on her small plot of land. She began to produce mechanically transplanted rice and strip-till maize. Her first harvest in 2015 deepened her understanding of the benefits of comparatively low utilization of irrigation, pesticides and labor.
Begam has since yielded a bumper maize crop using strip-till technology and her socioeconomic progress is an inspiration to her charland community. Even the floods of June 2017 failed take the smiles off her family’s faces and, in 2018, she and her family moved from a shack into a well-built tin-shaded house.
The profits from Begam’s higher yielding and more reliable maize and rice harvests have ensured access to proper education and food for her children, and her husband now helps cultivate their land using conservation agriculture technologies. “Anzuma did the right thing by not listening to my wrong decision back then in 2014,” he explains. “SRFSI showed her the right way to attain self-reliance through conservation agriculture technologies. I am proud of my wife.”
The Sustainable and Resilient Farming Systems Intensification (SRFSI) project is funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR).
On March 4, 2019, staff from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) welcomed Gerd Müller, Germany’s Federal Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), for a short visit to CIMMYT’s global headquarters in Mexico. Before exploring the campus and sitting down to hear about CIMMYT’s latest innovations in maize and wheat research, Minister Müller challenged the scientists gathered there by asking: “Is a world with no hunger actually possible?”
“It is possible, but it will require a lot of research and development activities to get there,” replied CIMMYT’s director general, Martin Kropff.
With $3.5 billion generated in benefits annually, CIMMYT is well positioned for Minister Müller’s challenge. CIMMYT works throughout the developing world to improve livelihoods and foster more productive, sustainable maize and wheat farming. Its portfolio squarely targets critical challenges, including food insecurity and malnutrition, climate change and environmental degradation. In addition, over 50 percent of maize and wheat grown in the developing world is based on CIMMYT varieties.
Germany has generously supported CIMMYT’s work for decades in a quest to answer this very question, which aligns with the German government’s agenda to improving food and nutrition security, the environment and livelihoods.
“CIMMYT is working to find ways to allow developing countries to grow maize and wheat on less land so that a larger percentage of it can be freed for nutritious and higher value cash crops. This requires better seeds that are adapted to biotic and abiotic stressors, smarter agronomy and machinery, which CIMMYT develops with partners,” Kropff explained.
CIMMYT works between smallholders and small companies to create an incentive on one side to grow varieties and on the other side, to increase demand for quality grain that will ultimately become the tortillas and bread on customers’ dinner tables. These sustainable sourcing and breeding efforts depend on the breathtaking diversity of maize and wheat housed at CIMMYT’s genebank, the Wellhausen-Anderson Plant Genetic Resources Center, which is supported by German funding along with solar panels that generate clean energy for the genebank.
Through funding for the CGIAR Research Program on WHEAT and the CIM Integrated Experts Program, Germany’s GIZ and BMZ have also supported CIMMYT research into gender and innovation processes in Africa, Central and South Asia, enhancing gender awareness in both projects and rural communities and mainstreaming gender-sensitive approaches in agricultural research. As a result, CIMMYT researchers and partners have increased gender equality in wheat-based cropping systems in Ethiopia, reduced the burden of women’s wheat cleaning work in Afghanistan, and hosted a series of training courses promoting the integration of gender awareness and analysis in research for development.
In addition, the CIM Integrated Experts program has allowed CIMMYT to increase its efforts to scale up agricultural innovations and link research to specific development needs. With support from GIZ and in collaboration with the PPPLab, in 2018 CIMMYT researchers developed a trial version of the Scaling Scan, a tool which helps researchers to design and manage scaling at all project phases: at the beginning, during and after implementation.
CIMMYT is committed to improving livelihoods and helping farmers stay competitive through increasing labor productivity and reducing costs. CIMMYT’s mechanization team works to identify, develop, test and improve technologies that reduce drudgery and enable smallholders in Mexico, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia to adopt sustainable intensification practices, which require greater farm power and precision. In Ethiopia, CIMMYT has an ongoing collaboration with the GIZ/BMZ green innovation center — established as part of the ONE WORLD – No Hunger initiative — and is working with GIZ in Namibia to provide knowledge, expertise and capacity building on conservation agriculture. This includes the organization of training courses to mechanics and service providers on everything from the use to the repair of machinery and small-scale mechanization services.
“We’re on a mission to improve livelihoods through transforming smallholder agriculture, much of which depends on empowering women, scaling, market development and pushing for policies that would create the right incentives. Partnerships with local and international stakeholders such as Germany are at the core of CIMMYT’s operations and allow for us to have global impact,” said Kropff.
More photos of the visit are available here.
Imagine walking through a grocery store, doing your weekly shopping. Everything seems normal, but as you pick up a can, there’s no label. There’s nothing to tell you what the product is, and now you can’t reliably choose anything to eat this week.
Now switch gears and imagine a germplasm bank. Without the right labeling on these different varieties, it’s difficult to tell what’s new and what’s already been discovered when working on new research projects.
That’s where the Molecular Maize Atlas steps into play.
About nine years ago, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) started an initiative called the Seeds of Discovery (SeeD). This initiative facilitates easier access to and use of maize and wheat genetic resources.
SeeD achieves impact through five main components: genotyping, phenotyping, software tools, pre-breeding and capacity building.
“One of the aims of Seeds of Discovery was to best characterize germplasm,” says Sarah Hearne, a molecular geneticist and maize lead of SeeD. “At CIMMYT, our international germplasm bank holds in trust one of the largest and most diverse publicly available maize collections in the world.”
However, Hearne says this germplasm bank used to look like a grocery store without any labels or without labels that would allow someone to select a can of value. To combat this, SeeD decided to work on a labeling process for the germplasm bank: the Molecular Maize Atlas.
The Molecular Maize Atlas is an information platform that brings genotypic data resources and associated tools together. This genotypic data provides unifying information across landraces and acts as a common backbone, which other valuable information, like phenotypic data, can be added to.
Read the full article on SeedWorld.
To keep up with growing maize demand, breeders aim at optimizing annual yield gain under various stress conditions, like drought or low fertility soils. To that end, they identify the genetic merit of each individual plant, so they can select the best ones for breeding.
To improve that process, researchers at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) are looking at cost-effective ways to assess a larger number of maize plants and to collect more accurate data related to key plant characteristics. Plant phenotyping looks at the interaction between the genetic make-up of a plant with the environment, which produces certain characteristics or traits. In maize, for example, this may manifest in different leaf angles or ear heights.
Recent innovations in digital imagery and sensors save money and time in the collection of data related to phenotyping. These technologies, known as high-throughput phenotyping platforms, replace lengthy paper-based visual observations of crop trials.
Authors of a recent review study on high-throughput phenotyping tools observe that obtaining accurate and inexpensive estimates of genetic value of individuals is central to breeding. Mainassara Zaman-Allah, an abiotic stress phenotyping specialist at CIMMYT in Zimbabwe and one of the co-authors, emphasizes the importance of improving existing tools and developing new ones. “Plant breeding is a continuously evolving field where new tools and methods are used to develop new varieties more precisely and rapidly, sometimes at reduced financial resources than before,” he said. “All this happens to improve efficiency in breeding, in order to address the need for faster genetic gain and reduction of the cost of breeding.”
“Under the Stress Tolerant Maize for Africa (STMA) project, we are working on implementing the use of drone-based sensing, among other breeding innovations, to reduce time and cost of phenotyping, so that the development of new varieties costs less,’’ said Zaman-Allah. “The use of drones cuts time and cost of data collection by 25 to 75 percent compared to conventional methods, because it enables to collect data on several traits simultaneously — for example canopy senescence and plant count,” he explained.
Another great innovation developed under this CIMMYT project is what Zaman-Allah calls the ear analyzer. This low-cost digital imaging app allows to collect maize ear and kernel trait data 90 percent faster. This implies higher productivity and rigor, as more time is dedicated to data analysis rather than time spent on data collection. Using digital image processing, the ear analyzer gives simultaneous data of more than eight traits, including ear size and number, kernel number, size and weight.
Some national agricultural research systems and NGOs have adopted this digital imagery tool to better assess maize yields in farmers’ fields. For instance, CIMMYT and GOAL have used this tool to assess the extent of fall armyworm impact on maize crops yield in eastern Zimbabwe.
Scientists are exploring the use of different sensors for phenotyping, such as Red, Green and Blue (RGB) digital imaging or Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) devices. Infrared thermal and spectral cameras could lead to further progress towards faster maize breeding.
Such sensors can help collect numerous proxy data relating to important plant physiological traits or the plant environment, like plant height and architecture, soil moisture and root characteristics. This data can be used to assess the maize crop yield potential and stress tolerance.
Such breeding innovations are also making maize research more responsive to climate change and emerging pests and diseases.
For plant scientists, increasing wheat yield potential is one of the most prevalent challenges of their work. One key strategy for increasing yield is to improve the plant’s ability to produce biomass through optimizing the conversion of solar radiation into plant structures and grain, called radiation use efficiency (RUE). Currently, the process is 30-50% less efficient in wheat than in maize.
International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) wheat physiologist Gemma Molero, in collaboration with Ryan Joynson and Anthony Hall of the Earlham Institute, has been studying the association of RUE related traits with molecular markers to identify specific genes associated with this trait.
In December 2018, her team published their results in the article “Elucidating the genetic basis of biomass accumulation and radiation use efficiency in spring wheat and its role in yield potential,” shedding light on some of the genetic bases of biomass accumulation and RUE in a specially designed panel of lines that included material with diverse expression of RUE over the wheat crop cycle.
Over the course of two years, Molero and fellow researchers evaluated a panel of 150 elite spring wheat genotypes for 31 traits, looking for marker traits associated with yield and other “sink”-related traits, such as, grain number, grain weight and harvest index, along with ‘’source’’-related traits, such as RUE and biomass at various growth stages. Many of the elite wheat lines that were tested encompass “exotic” material in their pedigree such as ancient wheat landraces and wheat wild relatives.
The scientists found that increases in both net rate of photosynthesis and RUE have the potential to make a large impact on wheat biomass, demonstrating that the use of exotic material is a valuable resource to help increase yield potential. This is the first time that a panel of elite wheat lines has been assembled using different sources of yield potential traits, and an important output from a large global endeavor to increase wheat yield, the International Wheat Yield Partnership (IWYP).
“We identified common genetic bases for yield, biomass and RUE for the first time. This has important implications for wheat researchers, breeders, geneticists, plant scientists and biologists,” says Molero.
The identification of molecular markers associated with the studied traits is a valuable tool for wheat improvement. Broadly speaking, the study opens the door for a series of important biological questions about the role of RUE in yield potential and in the ability to increase grain biomass.
In order to accommodate worldwide population increases and shifts in diet, wheat yield needs to double by 2050 — and genetic gains in wheat, specifically, must increase at a rate of 2.4 percent annually. Increasing biomass through the optimization of RUE along the wheat crop cycle can be an important piece in the puzzle to help meet this demand.
Read the full study here.
Check out other recent publications by CIMMYT researchers below:
