Agriculture

Wolf Frommer of the Carnegie Institution for Science in the U.S., along with Bing Yang of Iowa State University and Frank White of Kansas State University will modify rice to be stably resistant to all strains of a major rice pathogen. Rice bacterial blight can cause up to 60% loss of yield in Asia and there are currently no effective ways to stop it. These bacteria steal sugar from the rice plants to fuel their own growth. They will block this fundamental mechanism by selectively modifying the DNA sequence of the rice using their TALEN technology.

Hundreds of edible species of ants, beetles, moths and other insects, rich in protein and iron (see http://bit.ly/1qam0HU), are only seasonally available for millions of people who consume them. This project will develop and distribute insect farming technologies to make this cheap, nutritious and safe food source available for year-round consumption in Kenya's slum conditions, reducing malnutrition and high rates of anemia, especially among pregnant women.

This project, run in collaboration with international partners Daisa Enterprises (formerly Wholesome Wave) and the McGill University Centre for the Convergence of Health and Economics, aims to pilot an innovative entrepreneurial approach to provide economic benefits and increase agricultural production, nutritional intake, and overall health to women in resource-poor rural and urban communities.

The project study proposes the development of nutrient rich genotypes in rice possessing the key nutraceuticals and therapeutic clues through which required nutrients such as iron and zinc for pregnant women and infants of rural households will be supplemented sustainably. Any improved line of rice will be compared with the traditional parents and other popularly eaten white rice varieties for its nutritional content and therapeutic values. The improved lines of rice having nutritive, anti-diabetic and therapeutic characters may be registered.

In this ICT-based pilot project, Digital Education, tested the impact of a combination of ICT and Participatory Learning Action (PLA) approaches to improve women's knowledge of nutrition in 30 villages. They promoted the dissemination of a series of nutrition-specific participatory videos to address nutrition-specific behaviors, locally feasible solutions as well as expenditure patterns to improve maternal and child diet quality.

This project aims to reduce human Zinc deficiency through biofortification by foliar zinc application. It aims to prove that this traditional and efficient strategy of agronomic biofortification, can be a rapid solution for improving zinc concentration in grain to address the ongoing human zinc deficiency.

The project intends to promote the adoption of an innovative model of farming - the Integrated Farming System (IFS) - in the Chidambaram region. It aims to demonstrate the effectiveness of this model of farming in improving agricultural productivity and create avenues for empowerment of women as well as augment household diet diversity and improve nutritional standards of 150 poor women farmers.

The project aims to ensure food-security throughout the entire year in a rural district by storing food through an innovative technology known as the Solar Conduction Dryer. It also aims to add extra income to women farmers from the sale of the dehydrated products of this technology, while providing valuable lessons in post-harvest losses.

We promote market accessibility of Nepali coffee by crowd-farming.

Leslie Shor and Daniel Gage of the University of Connecticut in the U.S. seek to demonstrate that protozoa can be used to spatially disseminate beneficial bacteria throughout the rhizosphere, which is the zone of soil around the plant roots. Native, encysted protists deployed in seed coatings could improve crop yields in smallholder farms by delivering viable biocontrol bacteria to growing root tips.