Kalro gets digital tools to boost food security
Food production in the country is set to increase as the government in conjunction with local and international agricultural stakeholders’ resort to use of modern equipment to commence food crops breeding programmes.
Kenya Agricultural Livestock Research Organisation (Kalro), a State corporation, received a donation of 23 assorted and specialised equipment worth Sh9.2 million from the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) Excellence in Breeding (EiB) early this week to kick-start the process.
Eliud Kireger, Kalro director general said the equipment will be distributed to the research organisation centres -Kitale, Katumani, Njoro, Mwea and Tigoniand to complement the ongoing initiative to digitise historical data.
“We have been using old traditional equipment and now we will be able to fast-track the whole process and make it more efficient, cheap and more accurate,” Dr Kireger said while receiving the digitisation equipment at the Kalro headquarters.
He added: “The modern equipment will go a long way in ensuring that breeders are able to undertake their work faster. more accurately and ensure food security and higher productivity of crops as well as benefit farmers.
Technology, Kireger said, is changing quickly in the world of plant breeding as compared to several years ago as there have been tremendous development in genomics, molecular technology.
According to CGIAR -EIB Coordinator Biswanath Das developing crop varieties that will respond to challenges of climate change, increased drought and temperatures, different distribution of pest and disease ought to be the new norm in terms of increased food production.
“This therefore emphasises of the importance of modernisation of the breeding programmes,” he said. The machines will be used in maize, wheat, rice, sorghum, beans, and potato breeding programs.
It is expected that the equipment used in breeding production will contribute to increase and availability of high yielding and disease resistant seeds to small-scale farmers who for long have been recycling their harvested crops into planting seeds.
“As of now, 20 years of maize historical data have been uploaded onto the breeding management system website, and will be accessible to future breeding teams for generations to come,” Kireger said.
Kireger reiterated the government's commitment to the use of new technology to enhance breeding food crops varieties.
Kalro is currently undertaking research of over 400 crops in all its centres across the country.
The crop varieties are highly sought after in the market owing to their ability to yield more and withstand the effects of diseases and pests among other attributes.
Even though the research organisation has recorded impressive strides in crop breeding, Kireger complained that general agriculture research is hindered by lack of digitisation equipment.
The instiutions mostly rely on laborious systems including manual layouts and collection, followed by manual data entry into computers which is prone to data entry errors and delays in analysis, publication and reporting.
“In addition, unreliable institutional memory which is critical for long-term programmes has constrained breeding of crop varieties,” Kireger added.
