Third-party testing provides the degree of
transparency that smallholder farmers need to access truly improved seeds that
perform in their local environments. It is the foundation for creating a
verified, reliable and transparent seed system, yet it has been a critical
missing component in African agricultural development.
The Feed the Future Innovation Lab for
Soybean Value Chain Research, led by the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign, is partnering with the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable
Agriculture to implement the first third-party testing of soybean in
Sub-Saharan Africa—more precisely, coordinated soybean variety tests across
several countries. The Soybean Innovation Lab is contributing to increased
productivity of smallholder soy farmers by addressing improved varieties,
supporting local best production practices, enhancing processing technologies,
and promoting development of the soy value chain.
Soybean has been the fastest growing broad
land crop in the world for the last 15 years. Yet farmers in Sub-Saharan
Africa—who produce less than one-half of one percent
of all soybean—have not yet
been able to tap into the soybean revolution. Farmers from this region achieve
only 20 percent of the yields compared with other tropical regions, partly
because they do not have access to improved high yield soybean varieties.
The research team is using the Syngenta
Foundation’s trialing platform, known as Seeds2B, which began to evaluate
tomato and sunflower seed varieties in 2013. Soybean Innovation Lab
researchers Brian Diers and Randall Nelson, from the University of Illinois,
approached the Syngenta Foundation to include soybean in the Seeds2B trialing
platform.
The Seeds2B platform provides testing and
registration of modern varieties and establishes distribution systems for
quality seed in Africa. Diers and Nelson provided a total of 38 soybean
varieties from the Soybean Innovation Lab’s research and private sector
partners across Africa and in Brazil for entry in the variety trial
evaluation.
Varieties were tested in a pre-trial in
Malawi over the 2014/15 winter season, and pre-testing began in 2014 in Kenya.
The full variety trial evaluation will be implemented in 2016 in three regional
tests: one in Kenya, one in Senegal and Mali, and one in Malawi and Zimbabwe.
Varieties will be grown in up to six locations in each region with three
replications in each location. Breeder rights are protected in the evaluations.
The Soybean Innovation Lab and Syngenta Foundation are focused on repeating the
trials in the current locations, including more varieties from interested
partners, and expanding testing sites and countries.
credit: https://www.feedthefuture.gov/sector/soy
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