Farmer-to-farmer training videos create demand for orange fleshed sweetpotatoes (OFSP) and high-quality planting material. A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. Images can convey ideas faster and more effectively than written words, and if many people in the target audience cannot read, pictures may be the only way to reach them. Faced with […]
Read More… from A video is worth a million sweetpotato vines
A staple to about 350 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, cassava, had been declared in 2003 by African Heads of State as a poverty fighter. However, the crop is yet to prove its mettle as millions of growers in sub-Saharan Africa who depend on the crop for their livelihoods still live below the poverty line. […]
Read More… from TAAT Excites Beninese Farmers with Pro Vitamin A Cassava Varieties
Late blight is the most destructive potato disease in the world. It affects all potato producers (small-scale, commercial, seed producers, even urban producers) and the annual losses in developing countries are estimated at EUR 10 billion. Late blight can attack many varieties of potatoes and most farmers use large quantities of fungicides to control this disease. The fungicides can cause environmental damage as well as human health problems when they are misused, since many farmers do […]
Read More… from Low-tech tool helps fight potato late blight
For the past decades, Africa has been grappling with the sustainable diffusion of improved cassava varieties due to a weak and uncoordinated dissemination strategy. Consequently, improved varieties have often failed to reach the hands of farmers, forcing the yields of cassava in Africa to remain low. However, the project– Building an Economically Sustainable, Integrated Cassava Seed System […]
Read More… from How BASICS is changing Nigeria’s cassava seed sector, creating seed entrepreneurs
A CGIAR-IITA scientist has developed a more cost and time effective molecular diagnostic tool that can accurately identify different subgroups of cassava whiteflies, Bemisia tabaci. The tool can be used in local laboratories in Africa that often lack expensive sequencing technologies. This innovation marks a major milestone in efforts to accurately characterize whiteflies, which transmit viruses that […]
Read More… from IITA scientist develops a cheaper and faster tool for identifying whiteflies
A paper published by a team led by scientists from IITA was among the top 10% most downloaded of all papers published between January 2018 and December 2019 in Wiley’s Plant Pathology journal. The research team received the news in a congratulatory message and an online certificate from the Journal. Part of the message stated: […]
Research for development organizations like the International Potato Center (CIP), which develop science-based solutions to the challenges faced by millions of smallholders, introduce and test those innovations with communities before taking them to scale. But taking even the most promising innovation to scale can be a challenge in and of itself, which is why researchers are increasingly […]
Read More… from Understanding partnership dynamics to facilitate innovation scaling
Small-scale sweetpotato farmers in Uganda have adopted innovative technologies that not only improve dairy and pork yields, but also reduce their production costs. Sweetpotato is the third most important staple in Uganda, behind cassava and banana. Many farmers who grow sweetpotato also raise pigs or cattle. During the sweetpotato harvest, they may feed sweetpotato vines, […]
Read More… from Sweetpotato refuse becomes a valuable resource
A detailed survey of mountain communities in Peru has revealed that farmers are adjusting to the pressures of climate change and population growth in complex ways that take full advantage of the adaptability of their main crop, the potato. Nevertheless, researchers warn that “the plasticity shown by the potato and the adaptability of smallholder cultivation […]
Read More… from Flexible farming preserves potato diversity… for now
Valued at dining room tables and factory floors alike, cassava is worth about $10 billion in Asia. The continued growth of the commodity faces challenges from climate change, land degradation and limited investment in crop improvement and disease. Half a century ago, cassava was a simple staple crop for some smallholder farmers in Asia eking […]
An innovative process turns cassava waste into valuable livestock feed and is ripe for scaling out. Nigeria is the largest producer of cassava in the world, growing about a fifth of the global harvest, some 57 million tonnes in 2016. While this rise has undoubtedly helped to alleviate hunger in the country, it creates a […]
Read More… from Scaling up the use of cassava peel as animal feed in Nigeria
A second edition of the indispensable handbook Tropical Root and Tuber Crops: Cassava, Sweet Potato, Yams and Aroids has been published by CABI. Originally published in 2009, this new edition reflects a decade that has seen renewed interest in and, more importantly, greater investment in tropical root and tuber crops. “An impressive volume of research […]
Read More… from A compendium of knowledge on tropical roots and tubers