As part of GCARD 2010, Farming First hosted a session entitled ‘Better Benefiting the Poor through Public-Private Partnerships for Innovation and Action.’ Within the discussions, our panel of experts addressed several case studies that present different ways that partnerships have helped to empower smallholder farmers around the world.
Michael Hermann – Crops for the Future
The need
The Improved Maize for African Soils Project (IMAS) has been set up to improve African farmers’ access to maize varieties that are better adapted at capturing fertilizer. By developing new varieties that are more efficient in nitrogen uptake, the project hopes to develop maize crops that have a 30-50% yield improvement over existing varieties.
Launched recently
Being essentially an agrarian country, Cambodia is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. The main staple food is rice – and rain-fed lowland rice production accounts for more than 80% of the total rice area – but flooding, drought, and pests and disease are increasingly common due to changes in the climate, thus
New research coming out of the Scripps Research Institute and the University of California, San Diego, has determined the molecular structure for a drought-tolerant plant hormone called abscisic acid.
In drought conditions, plants begin to produce more of this hormone, which creates a number of changes to their physical structure. Their seeds lie dormant in the
The Gates Foundation has provided this video to show how one of their grantees’ low-cost treadle pumps are helping Indian farmers access irrigated water for their crops.
These water pumps are supplied by International Development Enterprises (IDE). They are designed to be cost-effective and low-maintenance, with only one part needed to be changed each year at
A new ‘fieldprint’ calculator introduced by Field to Market: The Keystone Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture helps farmers in the U.S. to assess how some of their operational decisions affect their sustainability performances.
The tool can be applied to a variety of crops, including corn (maize), cotton, soybeans, and wheat. It helps farmers to assess their land
