IITA modernizing farm operations in partnership with Bayer
July 30, 2022
With an overall mission to assure food security in Africa, IITA constantly seeks agricultural solutions to overcome hunger and poverty in the region. Achieving this requires a constant drive to develop and transform technologies and practices to maximize crop yields. To ensure this, the Institute is partnering with Bayer to modernize its farm management and breeding operations across all projects and programs it is engaged in.
The collaboration covers plot execution, including crop breeding, operational safety, and planting. It kicked off with Bayer donating equipment, including planters, to the cowpea and soybean programs in northern Nigerian Kano State and Zambia. A technical group from Kenya then came to IITA-Kano to train the technicians to operate the equipment and exposed them to general good agronomy practices (GAP).
Group photograph at Bayer Petit Research Farm in South Africa.
According to the Head of Farm Management and Breeding Operations at IITA, Alick Mulenga, they decided to extend the training to 15 breeding program staff in Ibadan. During the training, the technicians learned how to properly set up and manage trials to generate high-quality and reliable data for breeding programs from the plots. The training also focused on weed and pest management, fertility management, and equipment calibration and maintenance. The exercise culminated in fieldwork to understand the current field operations in research plots.
Following this, Mulenga visited the Bayer research facility in Johannesburg, South Africa, with Soybean Breeder Godfree Chigeza, IITA-Zambia Farm Manager Gift Mutale, and IITA-Malawi Research Associate, Nundwe McDonald to explore further areas of collaboration. During the visit, they examined seed processing, plot setup, and irrigation systems. They also spent time with Bayer’s Health and Safety team to understand how Bayer safeguards employee safety and well-being within the farm.
“It was sort of an eye opener for us,” gushed Mulenga, who has the mandate to transform the Institute’s breeding operations along with IITA Head of Breeding John Derera. “It showed us how far we have to go to modernize breeding operations in IITA. We still have a lot to do,” he continued.
According to Mulenga, modernizing IITA’s farm operations will increase efficiency and make the Institute more environmentally friendly. Accomplishing this would require increased mechanization, reducing operational costs and improving precision associated with manual labor.
Bayer team visiting IITA farm in Lusaka, Zambia.
“We currently do much of our work by hand, and that introduces a lot of variability in the breeding plots, because four people planting on a plot might plant at different depths and spacing. But using a properly calibrated planter—which we were working on with Bayer in Kano—is more precise, making things like depth and spacing uniform across the board,” said Mulenga.
He also highlighted employee health and safety as critical components in achieving excellent results. Different programs and projects currently implement health and safety policies independently—some do it better than others—but the Institute wants to standardize everything to safeguard all the employees.
Health and safety concerns impact breeding efficiency, as do the other factors. IITA is resolute in the decision to tackle all these to modernize its farm operations and achieve the Institute’s vision of Africa becoming a global leader in agriculture and sustainability.
Olamide Deborah Nwanze is a Senior Research Associate specializing in gender mainstreaming research to inform participatory and inclusive breeding, variety development, and seed systems policies regarding root, tuber, and banana (RTB) crops in the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture Headquarters, Ibadan, Nigeria. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Ibadan and holds an MSc and B. Agric in Agricultural Extension and Rural Development. Olamide is a fellow of the African Women in Agricultural Research and Development – Gender Responsive Agricultural Systems Policy (AWARD-GRASP) and the Gender Responsive Researchers Equipped for Agricultural Transformation (GREAT). She seeks to apply her gender-mainstreaming learnings, gender-responsive research, and policy development, and review expertise to facilitate women, youth, children, and vulnerable social group’s access to and adoption of agricultural Innovations that guarantee food, nutrition, income, and livelihood security in Africa. Her current roles include mentoring research fellows, development of guides and training manuals, implementation and adaptation of gender frameworks and tools, value chain actors’ engagement as citizen science partners, policy review and redesign, data management, and analysis. Her current research explores mixed methods and participatory and interdisciplinary approaches to capture and highlight gender dynamics, needs, preferences, and challenges stakeholders face within the agricultural livelihood value chain to prioritize gender-inclusive strategies in breeding programs, policy design, and implementation.
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