I’m very much looking forward to meeting many of you at the Joint Pan-African Grain Legume and World Cowpea Conference that opens in Livingstone, Zambia, on 28 February. N2Africa will be strongly represented at the conference with posters and oral presentations. The meeting promises to be a great scientific event as well as a wonderful opportunity to meet other legume fanatics and to discuss their work.

Bale Zone is one of the target sites for implementation in Ethiopia where faba bean and chickpea legume crops are targeted under the South-East Public-Private Partnership cluster.

Grain legumes produce a valuable grain crop for consumption or sale but they also produce residues that can be fed to livestock. As part of my PhD project I have been looking at variability among popular legume varieties and whether improved agronomic practices such as P fertilizer and inoculation, designed to increase grain yields, also affect residue yield and quality. Residue samples were collected from N2Africa input and variety trials plots established during the 2013/14 cropping season.

In Ethiopia where the mixed crop-livestock system is a predominant feature in agriculture, promotion of improved production technology is expected to boost grain legume production with a concomitant increase in the amount of legume residues for livestock feeding.

N2Africa followers do not need convincing about the benefits of legumes to smallholders. Yet, legumes mean different things to different people. Agro-foresters may think of tree legumes, livestock specialists may interpret legumes to mean forages, while to crop agronomists legumes tend to be grain legumes. Legumes are indeed a diverse class of plants – they are diverse in form: from the mighty Acacia to the diminutive white clover.