Esther Ronner is research assistant employed by N2Africa at Wageningen University and is conducting her PhD studies within the project.

Objective:

To screen effective, competitive and host broad spectrum of common bean and chickpea rhizobia for use in African soils.

Main activities:

I am Ojo Comfort Tinuade, one of the N2Africa PhD rstudents with Wageningen University and a Research Fellow with International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Ibadan. My research interest is to explore the potential benefits of rhizobia inoculation with cowpea. My research activities includes estimating the population density of indigenous rhizobia in soil samples collected from Northern Nigeria, isolation and identification of highly competitive and efficient rhizobia strains from Nigerian soils.  

In Rwanda like in many sub-Saharan Africa countries, increasing population hence reduction of farm size, declining soil fertility and high fertilizer cost have been reported as major production constraints for smallholder farmers. The use of organic inputs and biological nitrogen fixation are alternative to cut down fertilizer costs. Rwandan government has recently set a policy of one cow per poor family in one hand to deal with soil fertility issues.

Two on-farm trials were conducted in the 2013 and 2014 cropping seasons in the northern Guinea savannah agroecological zone (AEZ 1) and the Sudan savannah agroecological zone (AEZ 2) of Ghana to evaluate the effect of intercropping patterns and the effect of cowpea-maize relay intercropping on crop productivity. The intercropping patters were within-row intercropping and 1:1 and 2:2 distinct rows of maize- legume (Figure 1a, b). The legumes tested included cowpea, soyabean and groundnut. The trials were conducted across fields of different soil fertility levels.

Common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) is one of the most important grain legumes in Uganda. It forms an important part of the traditional diet and provides a good source of income for the rural communities. Experiments with rhizobial inoculation on beans in East Africa have met with varying success. One possible explanation is that common bean can establish effective symbiosis with broad range of native rhizobia. The role of this so-called promiscuity in the irregular response to inoculation remains to be established.

Agriculture in Ghana is dominated by small-scale crop-livestock farming based on cereal and legume production and livestock rearing. Livestock rearing is an important component of crop-livestock farming system because it serves as an insurance against crop failure, a source of manure, a source of cash and makes good use of crop residues. The main objective of this study is to understand the roles and functions of grain legume residues in livestock farming systems and identify options to improve utilisation by smallholders in northern Ghana.

Data availability often limits detailed assessment and explanation of yield gaps at farm level. Bottom-up data collection approaches (e.g. crowdsourcing) can be used to overcome lack of data and improve yield gap analysis. A case study with 50 farmers selected from 5 districts was carried out in Ethiopia. The main objective of the case study was to explore the opportunities and applicability of innovative bottom-up data collection approaches like crowdsourcing (using SMS) and digital devices (tablets) to collect factors that could explain yield gap.