Yam is a collective name of tuber crops belonging to the genus Dioscorea. Yam is important not only as a staple food crop but also as an integral component of society and culture of the millions of people who depend on it. However, due to its regional importance, yam has long been regarded as an “orphan crop” lacking a due global attention. Although this perception is changing with recent advances in genomics technologies, domestication processes of most yam species are still ambiguous. This is ...

Genome editing is an emerging powerful new breeding tool, which can be applied for genetic improvement of banana for important agronomic traits such as resistance to biotic stresses, adaptation to climate change, and high yielding. Banana is an important staple food and cash crop, feeding millions of people in tropical and subtropical countries. Recently, CRISPR-Cas9-based genome editing system has been established for banana in a few laboratories. Here, we describe the procedures for generation ...

Tricot (triadic comparisons of technologies) is a citizen science approach for testing technology options in their use environments, which is being applied to on-farm testing of crop varieties. Over the last years, important progress has been made on the tricot methodology of which an overview is given. Trial dimensions depend on several factors but tricot implies that plot size is as small as possible to include farmers with small plots (yet avoiding excessive interplot competition) while many ...

The root and tuber crop farming system occurs in west and central Africa, bounded on the southern, wetter side by the tree crop farming system and on the northern, drier side by the cereal-root crop mixed farming system. The root and tuber crop farming system occupies an estimated 236 million ha and has an estimated human population of 112 million, of whom over 50 per cent live in rural areas. Poverty is relatively high with about half the rural population earning less than US$1.25 per day. The ...

M s. Hadja Salame Shaibu (Fig. 7.1) is a cowpea producer and processor in the Local Government Area of Dawakin Tofa. She grew up in a farming community where crop- livestock integration is a tradition. When she got married few decades ago, Salame continued farming and keeping livestock to support her new family, mainly in sorghum and cowpea production.

For decades, the vast majority of smallholder farmers in developing countries, mainly sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and to some extent South Asia (SA), heavily rely on non-improved and auto-saved variety seed, accounting for about 80% of their material used for planting. Though the seed use figures by farmers vary from one region to another, with West Africa showing the lowest rate of improved seed use (below 20%) and South Asia with much higher rate (up to 70%), the overall situation looks less ...

The cocoa industry has been the mainstay of the Ghanaian economy over the years through the provision of revenues from foreign exchange earnings and the generation of employment for farmers who are mainly small holders. Climate change is a phenomenon that has been taking place throughout history but over the last century it has accelerated and scientists believe it is increasingly due to human activities (Cook et al, 2016). The climate in Ghana has likewise been affected and it is having an impact ...