This year’s British Society for Plant Pathology (BSPP) Grand Challenges in Plant Pathology Study Group gathered at Chicheley Hall, Milton Keynes, UK, 25-28 September 2018. Chicheley Hall is a grade II listed country mansion, home of the Kavli Royal Society International Centre. This was the second meeting of its kind, following on from the first successful meeting at the University of Oxford in 2016.
CABI’s global Plantwise programme has a major impact helping farmers in Kenya grow more and lose less to crop pests and diseases, according to a new impact report published today. Research undertaken by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and published today, shows that:
Typhoon Mangkhut (local name: Ompong) recently swept across the northern island of Luzon, Philippines, severely affecting the country’s bread basket. According to the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council, approximately 171,932 farmers have suffered as a consequence of the storm.
Women keep in touch through the power of radio
Campaigns create greater equality of access to information across farming households, but formats are as important as channels, argue Duncan Sones of the Africa Soil Health Consortium (ASHC) delivery team…
The ASHC campaign-based approach explored the use of a variety of channels to build multiple media campaigns. ASHC has been testing the hypothesis that the more varied the channels of information reaching a farming household – the more likely they’re to trial or adopt new technologies. For example, evidence collected from the outcome evaluation of the Scaling-up Improved Legumes Technologies (SILT) in Tanzania suggested this is the case.
What we’re doing is increasing the equality of access to information. Over the next 18 months we’ll be looking for evidence that greater access to information, especially by women and young people, changes the conversations in farming households.
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Plantwise plant doctors are at the heart of our plant clinic network providing advice and information to farmers, logging their data for the Plantwise Knowledge Bank, and always adapting to new outbreaks and technologies.
Think you’ve got what it takes to be a plant doctor? Take our online quiz and find out! Continue reading
PEAT, CABI and ICRISAT launch the first live tracking tool for Fall Armyworm (FAW) in India.
The Fall Armyworm is a very invasive pest which is highly destructive to more than 80 plant species. The pest is native to America and has conquered the African continent in 2016. Since then, it has cost economies billions of dollars in crop losses and caused millions of farmers and their families destitution and hunger.
We’ve selected a few of the latest new geographic, host and species records for plant pests and diseases from CAB Abstracts. Records this fortnight include the first report of Croicidolomia binotalis as a serious pest of Brassica vegetables in Kashmir, India; a new species of Anagyrus from China and a new species of Colletotrichum causing anthracnose of chili in the Philippines. Continue reading
