I’ve been experiencing some pretty extreme changes in temperature recently – in early March I was in southern Mali with temperatures around  35^o C and then in the snow in Norway the next week with N2Africa colleagues for a RoundTable on Sustainable Soyabean. ...

^{Photo: N2Africa team at the Norwegian University of life Sciences, Ås, Oslo, in the snow. From left to right: Victor Antwi (AGRA), Ken Giller, Theresa Ampadu-Boakye, Bernard Vanlauwe, Samuel Adjei-Nsiah}

The Minister of Food and Agriculture of Ghana has requested N2Africa and Yara to boost soyabean production in northern Ghana as part of the “Planting for Food and Jobs” initiative. Here we report on progress.

On 5 November 2018, an N2Africa team comprising of Ken, Bernard, Theresa and Samuel and a team from Yara, comprising of Derick Tuffour, Danquah Addo-Yobo and Øystein Botillen, met at the IITA office in Accra, Ghana to discuss the possibility of forming a partnership around soyabean to continue with N2Africa project with possible funding from Norwegian government.

^{Photo: A roundtable discussion among a small group of invited experts and leaders, hosted by Yara International in Oslo addressed a wide range of soya related issues.  Photo: Camilla Nyhuus Christensen, Yara,}

In Tanzania, N2Africa and a number of related projects jointly developed and applied a range of innovative communication approaches to scale-up improved legume technologies. To assess the effectiveness of these communications approaches, N2Africa, the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI), Farm Radio International (FRI) and other partners designed a survey tool using Computer Aided Telephone Interviews (CATI).

^{Figure: N2Africa action areas-Districts 2015-2018}

Update on the legacy in DRC based on three questions asked to all Tier 1 country coordinators:

• To what extent is there still a (knowledge) network around legumes and nitrogen fixation active in your country?
• To what extent are private sector and/or NGOs still selling/using/promoting “N2Africa technologies”? Can farmers readily access seeds, inoculants, legume-specific fertilizers?
• Are there any interesting new developments taking place around legumes and nitrogen fixation?

^{Photo: Carrying the bean harvest home}

Update on the legacy in Malawi based on the three questions mentioned above asked to all Tier 1 country coordinators.

^{Photo: Entrance of the new AISL laboratory near completion}

Despite decades of intensive research on Rhizobium-legume symbioses, we are still only beginning to understand the factors that influence the survival, persistence, efficiency and competition of rhizobial strains in various environmental conditions.

Research focused on the identification of both competitive and highly effective nitrogen-fixing strains has been limited because, so far, the only way to test competitive rhizobial strains has been to isolate individual strains and compare them one at a time in large-scale plant growth assays.

^{Photo: Nodules expressing green fluorescence occupied by Tagged-strains with Plasmid-IDs and non-fluorescent nodules occupied by indigenous rhizobia}

Among other duties, Ken Giller serves as a member of the Sustainable Sourcing Advisory Board of Unilever and through this he was asked to review this report. He was delighted to do so, as he finds it an important initiative to broaden the range of crops commonly used in foods. Of course he was not surprised to see that several legumes were selected by the Knorr team and the scientists who advised them. The final report can be downloaded here and the section on Beans and Pulses starts on page 11.