This dashboard aims to disseminate the findings of CGIAR-NARES breeding stations evaluations conducted by the Crops to End Hunger’s Facilities Upgrade and Mechanization Improvement project, identifying areas for improvement.
This dashboard encapsulates the results of three projects improving the infrastructure and mechanization capabilities in priority breeding stations across Africa with Crops to End Hunger (CtEH) funds.
Crops to End Hunger (CtEH) is a CGIAR effort to accelerate and modernise the development, delivery and wide scale use of a steady stream of new crop varieties.
CGIAR Breeding Resource Initiative (led and managed by Genetic Innovation’s Breeding Research Services unit) sends out periodic updates to inform partners about plans, progress, events and resources. These updates are collated on this page. For more information, please contact: a.hunt@cgiar.org
Gender inclusion must be supported at all levels within an organization. This checklist will help you acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of your organization’s gender inclusion initiatives and measures.
Download the checklist (Word file)
Improvements are generally on five key Action Areas:
Having a standard process for performing the work you do is essential to providing quality products and services to your customers. Documenting the current best-known way of doing the work ensures consistency. In this month’s Operational Excellence Webinar, learn about standard work and how to document it.
In this five-day workshop video series, EiB's Breeding Operations Network for Development (BOND) and IITA facilitated operational leads and breeders in the West Africa region to build knowledge, and discuss progress to improve regional breeding operations.
This webinar is one of our monthly Operational Excellence Webinars to support and promote a continuous improvement culture. The webinar begins with a quick review of some behaviors that exist in a continuous improvement culture. Kehinde will lead a session on process mapping that will feature the value stream map.Ben Hartman (Clay Bottom Farms), Chyka Okarter (USAID Nigeria FtF Agricultural Extension & Advisory Services Activity) and Jean-Pierre Rousseau (Winrock International) will present their work in creating Lean farms in Nigeria.
As part of the BOND network, we explored Corteva's approach to embedding culture and practices of sound health and safety, followed by IITA's operational health and safety practices.
Speakers:
Paige Oliver (Corteva): Seed Product Development Network and Systems Global Leader for Corteva Agriscience™.
Have you ever become frustrated by facing the same problem over and over again, despite repeated attempts to solve it? This EiB webinar aims to teach methods to get to the root cause of the issues you face in the workplace, and learn about how they have been put into practice in the Crop Health Improvement project at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).
CGIAR drone team in a maize field in India (Source: ICRISAT)
New and more accessible digital phenotyping technologies and methods can help breeding programs collect data faster and better. EiB is partnering across CGIAR to expand, accelerate and streamline adoption.
CGIAR Excellence in Breeding’s BOND and Bayer Crop Science look at Bayer’s principles and practices on two key breeding operations issues:
Experts from Bayer Crop Science’s Africa Phenotyping Leadership Team provide a conceptual overview of phenotyping. The team will introduce Bayer’s global phenotyping organization and discuss critical concepts, approaches, and best practices associated with field testing and data management.
Breeding operations teams are vital for ensuring programs deliver the varieties needed by smallholder farmers. There are many good practices being adopted; it's time to share and collaborate.
Public breeding operations teams serving lower income countries need to upgrade their skills and tools, optimize their programs, and deliver better varieties, faster. CGIAR’s new Breeding Operations Network for Development (BOND) is ready to make the connections.
WHAT IS BOND?
The aim of Breeding Operation Network for Development (BOND) is to connect and further professionalize CGIAR, national agricultural research services (NARS), and other interested breeding professionals. BOND will help facilitate opportunities that lead to the acceleration of mechanization, technological capacities, and skill levels of operations professionals and teams.
BOND connects operations professionals, helps develop and implement standardized operating procedures (SOPs) between partner centers, and promotes continuous improvement at the operational level in all technical aspects. BOND works in the most relevant areas, including phenotyping, agronomic practices, seed processing, planting and harvesting.
BOND launched June, 2021 with new programs and opportunities being developed over time. As a “community of practice with teeth,” BOND seeks the creation of real-world opportunities for members to improve their knowledge, skills and connections. The network will share Information about practices, technologies, tools, resources and events, and where possible, provide connections for expert interdisciplinary advice on the best breeding operations practices.
BOND is facilitated by CGIAR Excellence in Breeding (EiB)'s Operations and Phenotyping module. EiB aims to accelerate the modernization of CGIAR/NARS breeding programs to increase the rates of genetic gain and varietal turnover.
BACKGROUND:
With food demand expected to double by 2050 in low-income countries, crop breeding programs must meet the needs of farmers in these regions. Critical to this is delivering high-yielding, nutritious varieties adapted to new climate conditions. Public sector breeding needs to take a key role to ensure that smallholder farmers and consumers get the varieties they need.
Vital to this are breeding operations teams across CGIAR and NARS. To ensure the heritability of breeding trials, they need to continuously improve and enhance capabilities, procedures, and standardization of practice. These practices and expertise need to be available as resources and on-the-ground with operational teams to support breeding programs across all trials. BOND will help teams and experts share information and access opportunities to reach these goals.
OPPORTUNITIES:
Over time, BOND will offer and facilitate opportunities such as:
EVENTS & RESOURCES:
BOND related news & blogs:
QUERIES: Contact EiB's Gustavo Teixeira: G.TEIXEIRA (a) cgiar.org
Rice production in rainfed lowland and upland areas is critical to global food supply, but is characterized by low and unstable yields due to a range of adverse climate and soil conditions. A large degree of genetic variation exists within Oryza sativa, and that variation can be exploited by identifying stress-tolerant germplasm for use in breeding to enable the development of new stress-tolerant high-yielding varieties.
The equipment will help speed up and enhance the accuracy of various breeding processes including seed preparation, data collection, data analysis and inventory management.
How can breeders and other research programs continually improve their processes and products? And how can they ensure they keep a customer focus at the centre of their work?
UAV phenotyping is about collecting useful and meaningful data for integration into crop breeding programs. As such, a complete UAV phenotyping program should ideally include guidelines and considerations to evaluate the readiness of every part of the full process in order to ensure that no bottlenecks impede the throughput of the phenotyping activities all the while focused on the end goal of data.
In February, the CGIAR Excellence in Breeding (EiB) Platform assessed breeding operations and phenotyping capacity at five CGIAR and national crop research stations in West Africa.
During the week of 12 August 2019, cassava and yam breeders from CGIAR and national agricultural research centers in Colombia, Nigeria, Uganda and Tanzania participated in an EiB-sponsored visit to Brazil.
After carrying out assessments at 13 CGIAR centers, the trip was one of the improvement opportunities identified by EiB breeding operations and phenotyping specialists Steve Corak and Gustavo Teixeira.
In March 2019, EiB surveyed its members to identify the models of equipment currently used to digitize breeding operations.
These include package printers, label printers, barcode readers, electronic data collectors and seed counters that can be used to speed up, standardize and introduce efficiency savings into breeding program operations.
The survey results will be used to guide the outreach agenda of EiB module leaders, while the makes and models of equipment preferred by EiB users are available for reference on the EiB Toolbox.
In March 2019, EiB surveyed its members to identify preferences for models of equipment used to digitize breeding operations. The results are provided below.
In managed drought stress trials, it is critical to achieve the required level of drought at the target crop stage in order to generate high-quality, repeatable trial data.
The three key factors to be taken account are:
Crop breeding programs using conventional and/or molecular breeding approaches rely heavily on high-quality phenotypic data generated by evaluating genotypes in different environmental conditions, such as drought.
In this manual, the traits of interest for phenotyping are those that mitigate yield losses rather than those involved in the survival or escape of plants exposed to drought stress.
This manual is targeted at maize breeders and field technicians in tropical environments who are working on improving maize tolerance to drought stress.
