Agriculture

Simon Krattinger of CSIRO Plant Industry in Australia, along with Beat Keller and Evans Lagudah of the University of Zurich, seek to generate transgenic rice and sorghum that are resistant to specific pathogenic fungi by introducing a known disease resistance gene, Lr34, from wheat.

Aymeric Goyer of Oregon State University and Pamela Ronald of the University of California, Davis in the U.S. will develop rice plants that accumulate higher levels of thiamine (vitamin B1) to test the theory that boosting thiamine enhances the plant's resistance to disease. This strategy could lead to crops that can not only resist two devastating pathogens, Xanthomonas oryzae and Magnaporthe grisea, and lead to higher yields, but also produce rice of higher nutritional value.

Jodie Wu of Global Cycle Solutions in Tanzania will evaluate an affordable hand-powered multi-crop thresher to enable smallholder farmers to thresh a variety of crops in a fast and modular way. The thresher significantly increases productivity, works without electricity, and is portable, thereby reducing costs to the individual farmer. It is easy to manufacture from cheap and available parts, and is thus easy to maintain. A prototype, designed in collaboration with local farmers, has already been successfully tested.

Joseph Parse of Synovision Solutions in the U.S. will develop equipment to convert waste plastic shopping bags into drip irrigation tubing suitable for use by women smallholder farmers in developing countries. In arid regions where water is in short supply, carrying or pumping water for irrigation on smallholder farms is time- consuming and inefficient. These regions tend to also have lots of consumer waste, including plastic shopping bags.

Charles Spillane, Paul Wagtaff, and Una Murray of the National University of Ireland, Galway, in Ireland will lead a team in working to enable women smallholder farmers in Tanzania to design and develop their own labor-saving agricultural tools. They will work with six women farmer groups to identify agricultural and food processing tasks that require the highest labor demands, and assist them with designing improved tools. The top designs will then be scanned with a 3D camera and printed as plastic prototypes using low-cost printers.

Ton Rulkens and his team from Oxfam-Solidarité in Belgium will bring together women smallholder farmers, local blacksmiths, and scientists in a participatory approach to design labor-saving hoes for tilling and weeding in Northern Mozambique. Successful and widespread implementation of labor-saving tools has proven difficult to achieve partly due to a lack of consideration of local conditions. By taking into account women's preferences, accessibility constraints, social systems, and cultural beliefs, they will design improved hoe samples that should be more readily adopted.

Margaret Smith and colleagues at Iowa State University in the U.S. will evaluate a simple, portable, hand-operated seed cleaner using 320 women farmers in Uganda. Current practices are physically demanding, time consuming, and reduce the quality of the grain. They will refine the design of the seed cleaner using input from the target farmers to produce a second-generation device for local manufacturing. It will then be tested with several legume crops for durability, ease of transport, and affordability for groups of smallholder women farmers.

August Basson of the KEL Growing Nations Trust in Lesotho and collaborator Adriaan Jacobs will develop a time-saving seed planter adapted for use by small-scale women farmers planting maize and other grain crops. No-till planters reduce soil disturbance in order to promote conservation agriculture and improve productivity, but current models were designed for commercial use and down-scaled, making them inefficient and impractical for use by women. They will engineer an adapted rotary punch planter and distribute them for testing in the field.

Alice Irene Whittaker-Cumming and Veronica Kette of Mother Nature Partnership and the African Women Education and Development Forum in the U.S. will provide innovative reusable menstrual cups and related education to women smallholder farmers. Current cultural taboos inhibit women from farming while menstruating, substantially reducing productivity. Building on a successful pilot project, they will scale-up testing to 5,000 women smallholder farmers in rural Cameroon to evaluate the impact on productivity and behavior.

Ockie Bosch and his team at the University of Adelaide in Australia will create a virtual Evolutionary Learning Laboratory (ELLab) to identify sustainable labor-saving innovations in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The ELLab is a systems approach designed to incorporate thinking from all relevant groups, such as the farmers, policy makers, and tool developers, in order to define useful, practical, and broadly applicable solutions.