East and Southern Africa Crop Tour provides farmers opportunity to evaluate new rice varieties and technologies

Scientists from IRRI, Africa Rice Center, and national agricultural research and extension system (NARES) partners engaged with rice farmers and other value chain stakeholders from Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique from 29 April to 10 May during the 2024 Crop Tour in East and Southern Africa (ESA). Through frequent engagement between IRRI scientists and NARES partners, the crop tour has significantly improved the quality of trials conducted in the ESA region.

The group visited 33 field sites across the three countries to work with 29 research and dissemination partners to inform and improve regional and local breeding and crop management practices, seed systems, and product management. This concerted effort intends to identify and create awareness of the best-fit, high-yielding, climate-smart varieties, which can, in turn, help improve farmers’ adoption rate, increasing their productivity and yield in the long run.

“The crop tour is a critical element of the varietal design, development, and dissemination process,” said IRRI’s Regional Breeding, Seed Systems and Product Management Lead for Africa, Ajay Panchbhai. “It enables breeders to continuously improve germplasm in the breeding pipelines to suit the rice-growing ecologies in Africa. It also guides our seed systems specialists to optimize the scaling models per the new varieties’ market segment.”

Crop tours also allow researchers to listen to the preferences of smallholder farmers and value chain stakeholders, including currently grown varieties, gaps, and new demands. At the same time, farmers and value chain actors see the performance of the latest rice varieties in the fields.

Farmers share what they learned while cultivating the improved rice varieties on their farms, providing scientists with the feedback needed to design products with…