AWS Community Day CPH - Three problems of Terraform
[Day 3] Agcommons Quickwin: African Trial Sites
1.
2. Trial Sites
Cultivar testing is a key element in the process of
delivering varieties to farmers
Multi Environment Trials (MET) and GxE analysis
have a rich history going back 100+ years
Trial networks for the cereal crops have been
especially effective in the past
3. Trends in MET’s
RENACO [West and Central African Cowpea Research
Network], disappeared about 10 years ago when USAID
money stopped flowing
IBYAN (International Bean Yield Assessment Network) ended
in 1996 for lack of funds
In the 70’s germplasm was novel, more material out there
today
Greater quarantine restriction today
Growth of profit-oriented research groups, especially in Asia
and LAC
weakening of NARS and IARCs?
4. “The poor performance of public institutions in
disseminating improved varieties to small-scale
farmers is broadly accepted, and there is an urgent
need to design and test new institutional
arrangements …..”
World Bank Development Report 2007
5. Changes since heyday of MET’s
Changes in computing mean better data
management today
Computational Biology: Advances in bioinformatics
can link site phenotyping to molecular breeding
platforms
Computational Geography:
Geographic information
science and technology
The Internet
Web 2.0
6. Proposed Pilot Project:
Africa Trial Sites Catalogue - Reaching out to farmers, agronomists and
plant breeders with spatially efficient, participatory testing networks
A catalogue of trial
sites, managed and
maintained by
network community:
Melkassa, Ethiopia
site
19. Information on the performance of
varieties is rarely online
25%
Y ie ld in c r e a s e o v e r c h e c k s
*** ***
20%
+ ***
15%
***
10%
*** ***
* * +
5%
0%
0 -1 1 -2 2 -3 3 -4 4 -5 5 -6 6 -7 7 -8 8 -9 >9
14.0
Av e r a g e tr ia l yie ld (t/h a )
12.0
Yield of thr variety (t/ha)
Trial #: 18 41 38 48 31 27 21 22 20 7
10.0
8.0
6.0
4.0
2.0
0.0
0.0 2.0 4.0 6.0 8.0 10.0
Yield of the trial (t/ha)
Experimental Checks
20. Web 2.0 tools to increase velocity of
communications
.
A combination of geospatial, social-networking and e-commerce ICT tools can
quickly and cheaply address the need to accelerate technology transfer and
remove bottlenecks