With an overall mission to assure food security in Africa, IITA constantly seeks agricultural solutions to overcome hunger and poverty in the region. Achieving this requires a constant drive to develop and transform technologies and practices to maximize crop yields. To ensure this, the Institute is partnering with Bayer to modernize its farm management and breeding operations across all projects and programs it is engaged in.
The collaboration covers plot execution, including crop breeding, operational safety, and planting. It kicked off with Bayer donating equipment, including planters, to the cowpea and soybean programs in northern Nigerian Kano State and Zambia. A technical group from Kenya then came to IITA-Kano to train the technicians to operate the equipment and exposed them to general good agronomy practices (GAP).