| Dr KB Saxena is a pigeonpea expert with ICRISAT. He earned
his PhD in plant breeding and genetics from GB Pant University of
Agriculture and Technology, Pantnagar, India. He has been with ICRISAT
since 1974. He has played an instrumental role in the recent development
of the first commercial hybrid legume — a hybrid pigeonpea —
which produces 30 per cent higher yields. In addition, he is actively
promoting the use of pigeonpea for soil conservation in China and
India and has already begun pilot projects on the same. He has
over 200 publications to his credit.
In this interview by Matt McHugh, Dr Saxena talks about
his achievement, which took over three decades to come to fruition
and the current state of research in pigeonpea
What is the significance of the new development?
Botanically, pigeonpea is a perennial legume, but it is cultivated
as an annual. It's a very hardy and multipurpose plant, used not only
for grain, but also for other purposes such as fodder and efficient
fuel wood.
Pigeonpea is very important for the rejuvenation of poor soil.
It has a very deep root system — the root goes down five or
six feet, so it can break all the hardpan inside the soil. Somehow,
the roots will find a way to grow. And pigeonpea fixes 40–50kg
atmospheric N / ha.
Also, there's phosphorus in the soil that is bound to the soil
and not available to plants. The roots of pigeonpea produce an acid
that breaks these bonds and make the phosphorus available to plants.
In some places, such as Fiji, pigeonpea is used mainly with the
goal of recycling nutrients. In Fiji, the main crop is sugarcane
and pigeonpea is grown to replenish the soil.
Pigeonpea is very important as a sustainability crop. It doesn't
require a lot of fertiliser or a lot of water to grow, so it's a
poor man's crop in that sense. It can grow very well with less than
600–700 mm of water.
Traditional pigeonpea varieties are all long-duration types; they
mature in about 300 days. They have very specific uses, and sometimes
you'll find them growing as a perennial plant around houses, fencing,
etc. As a perennial, it can survive 3–4 years easily. And the
plant is also grown as a perennial if it's the long-poded type grown
as a vegetable.
When we started the program at ICRISAT in '74, our prime objective
was to reduce maturity so we could diversify cropping systems. So
we started breeding early-maturing types. We now have very early
varieties which can mature as early as 75–80 days.
Between those that mature at 75 days and those that mature at 300
days, if you look at the germplasm, you will find almost continuous
variation that gives a breeder a lot of flexibility.
From the farmer’s perspective, which is the better choice
- shorter duration or longer duration type? Are the yields different?
What happens is that, you don't grow many plants per unit area with
the longer-duration plants, so per unit area, the yield is not much
different.
Pigeonpea is grown as an intercrop in most places, and the traditional
varieties are always grown as intercrops. Intercrops give the benefit
of yielding two crops per year. Pigeonpea initially grows very slowly.
Later on, it grows more quickly. So, during the initial slow growth
three-month period, another crop, such as soyabean (a three-month
crop) can be grown. The soyabean–pigeonpea combination is the
most beneficial one in central India.
Pigeonpea-to-pigeonpea rows will be around two meters, and in between,
farmers put two rows of soyabean. Soyabean yields with intercropping
are as good as those in regular cropping. The system has been developed
in such a way as to give farmers something from that field even
in very poor conditions — that's why it's called a sustainable
crop.
This combination does very well, and we get a higher yield. Total
profit per unit area is higher with this technique.
Once we developed the short-duration types, we developed the agronomic
practices for them as well. We discovered that you have to grow
these types in a high-density system, which is around 200,000 plants
per hectare, compared to around 40,000 plants per hectare for normal
types. Per unit area, dry-matter production is almost the same,
because these are smaller plants.
But each has its own advantage and disadvantage.
Improving yield: A very unfortunate thing has happened in
this crop — over the last 60 years, there has been no improvement
in its yield. Area under pigeonpea has increased, because we've
developed varieties that are resistant to diseases or are early
maturing or better adapted to certain areas, but yield per se has
not increased significantly.
Because of this, at ICRISAT, we decided we should go for some type
of alternate breeding system, and that's where the idea of the hybrid
originated.
Most pulse crops are 99 per cent self-pollinating, but pigeonpea
is not. In pigeonpea, you get about 30 per cent outcrossing. So
we exploited that. Once there is natural outcropping, seed production
becomes easy. But our major problem was that we didn't have any
male-sterile material. (This means that the male parts of the plant
are inactive, therefore making the plant effectively only female
and preventing self-pollination.)
Initially, we searched for a mutant with those characteristics,
but we didn't succeed, so we started a deliberate program to produce
one. We crossed wild varieties of pigeonpea with domesticated varieties
— the different species are from 60 to 80 per cent related.
The plan was to get cytoplasm from one plant, the nucleus from
the other, and end up with a genome that has male sterility. We
didn't succeed for quite some time — it took about 30 years
to develop it. But we're very happy that something has finally come
out of all this work. And it's a very stable system.
Now we're looking for hybrids that give about 30–40 per cent
higher yield, because if you have to buy new seeds every year, the
advantage has to be sufficient to justify this. In normal, non-hybrid
varieties, farm-saved seeds can be used for three to four years
before new seeds should be bought; some farmers go over a decade
without buying new seeds. With hybrids, however, farm-saved seeds
possess only about 25 per cent of the vigour of the hybrid parents,
so yield quality is greatly reduced.
The hybrid seeds have already been released to some farmers —
these farmers get the benefit of the new seeds in exchange for feedback
on their experience with it, supplying ICRISAT with data that can
be used to further improve the hybrid.
Last year, we conducted trials in around 800 of these on-farm demonstrations,
and, on average, the hybrid was 28 per cent better than varieties.
In some fields, there was no advantage, while in others there was
a 120 per cent advantage. But the mean additional yield was about
28 per cent, which we were quite happy with.
Taking technology to the farmer: Now that we have the developed
a seed-production technology, the question is how to make sure the
new technology reaches farmers. For that, we've made contact with
private seed companies. We have a kind of consortium. We take money
from the private companies to fund our research, and they get seeds
for the parent plants that were used to create the hybrid —
they then create their own hybrids and make money by selling those
seeds. We also provide the same materials to universities and national
programs.
One hybrid is already in farmers' fields in trials, and another
hybrid is ready to go.
One variety should be released this year. It’s currently in
pre-released condition, and has already being released as truthfully
labelled seeds, where the producer (as opposed to the seed company)
takes responsibility for the seed quality.
What are you working on right now?
We are trying to develop some more hybrids — early, very early,
late, disease-resistant, large-seeded, of different colours, etc.
There are different demands in different markets. If we have diversity
in the product, then seed companies will be interested, because
they can then market a diverse product. So, we are helping them.
Diversifying hybrid parents is the main job. Then there’s
producing some hybrid seed, and marketing. This includes giving
the seeds free to village-level people. So far, we have distributed
around 6,000 1-kg seed packets, and we are in touch with the farmers
who are using them.
The farmers' reaction is very important — if it doesn’t
please the farmers, the hybrids won't succeed.
The hybrid chickpea we’ve developed is the world’s first
commercial legume hybrid. We take a lot of pride in that.
After hybrid work, another important part of our work is training
— training seed company people, university people, government
agency employees, etc,
in the production of seeds, the identification of variety, things
like that. We also invite people to see our material, so they can
see what kind of unreleased or early-generation material we have.
Right now, all our efforts are on modelling. We want to see, if
it's failing, why it's failing.
What is ICRISAT’s India focus?
The Government of India and the Indian Agricultural Research Institute
have provided us a lot of support. It shows they've realised the potential
of hybrids. They have been providing funding for the hybrid project
for the last seven or eight years.
We have funding from the Gates Foundation, other corporate grant
programmes, and miscellaneous sources here and there.
We’re in talks with the Tatas to get them involved with us
in pigeonpea, in the areas of hybrids and short-duration types in
hilly areas of northern India.
I think we can really make a big impact in these two areas. With
hybrids, we can really increase pigeonpea yield, and with the promotion
of pigeonpea in hilly areas, we can impact areas where pigeonpea
has not been grown, but we now have technology that makes it very
economical.
I went to such an area last month, and now all the farmers are
replacing all their unproductive crops with pigeonpea, because there's
money in this crop now. It's more than $1 per kilogram, whereas
other pulses cost half that much.
Another factor that may not seem important to us but is to the
farmer, is that after the pigeonpea is harvested, the plants’
dry stems remain in the field, and eventually new leaves grow on
them. This provides fodder for grazing cattle.
In hilly areas, we are promoting one variety now, but we have another
one on the way. Farmers in hilly areas are very poor. They don’t
have protein sources in their diet. They grow a little fava bean,
a little cowpea, some soyabean and rajma. And most of the time their
crops are just killed by one disease or another because they grow
local varieties — there's not much good material there. So
we want to promote these techniques there. I’m very excited
about the possibilities.
Besides the hybrid and hilly-variety pigeonpeas, we are also working
to develop seed production and distribution models, which is very
important. In pulses, seed is the number one problem. The main reason
for that is private companies have little interest because there
is only a small profit margin when farmers can use farm-saved seeds
for years on end with little decrease in productivity.
Building farmer awareness: So what we are trying to do for
pigeonpea, chickpea, and groundnut, too, is to make the farmer aware
of seed quality and teach them the system they can use to produce
their own good-quality seed and thus not depend on anyone else.
Because farmers are being exploited by people selling low-quality
seeds. We want farmers to know what they are buying and why they
are buying it.
Also, we’ve made farmer societies in villages. They produce
seeds of one pigeonpea variety in one village. (Because of the fear
of outcrossing, we don’t want two varieties too close to each
other.) We encourage the farmers to then make their own packets
of seeds and market them to their friends in nearby villages. And
what is left over is purchased by government seed companies. The
system is working very well.
This year, we are multiplying 40 tonnes of seed in one district
of Maharashtra.
But one major problem that remains unsolved is pest damage. We’ve
been working for so many years with little or no success. We’re
still working on it, now trying to introduce the Bt gene. Pest damage
to pigeonpea is a worldwide problem, except in hilly where the temperatures
are too low for pests to proliferate.
What in your opinion is the major problem is that prevents more
farmers from employing more up-to-date techniques or practices?
One of the biggest things is that farmers don’t have access to
quality seed. Varieties are available, but there are no agencies that
produce large quantities of seed and give them to farmers. No one
does it because there’s no money in it. And the government hasn’t
been very involved here either, though they are slowly becoming involved.
In the West, for example in Canada, the situation is different
because their farms are very large and their systems are much more
organised than ours — here we have thousands of small farmers,
so we have to develop a different kind of system. In western countries,
one farm needs seeds for 100 or 200 hectares. In India, we’re
talking about scales of around half a hectare. So the access is
not there to quality seeds. Excellent varieties that have a high
level of genetic resistance to disease have been developed by national
programs, but still, diseases are ravaging crops because these seeds
are not being produced in nearly large enough quantities, so farmers
just aren’t getting them.
Is that why you work on seed-production and distribution models?
We do seed-production models to find the advantages and disadvantages.
The models will vary from crop to crop and place to place. For pigeonpea,
with outcrossing, maintenance and variety is difficult and has not
been very good. We examine models based on seed–village systems
— one village, one variety. For chickpea and groundnut, outcrossing
isn’t a problem, so they can multiply in the normal way, but
breeders still have to make quality selections from the material available.
Somebody should be responsible for processing, somebody should be
responsible for storage, and somebody for distribution. Those things
have to be worked out.
A very good example occurred recently. High-quality groundnut seeds
were distributed in one district and then a prolonged drought occurred
that prevented their being sowed. ICRISAT intervened, asking the
government to buy back all the seed. Otherwise, the farmers would
have sold all the seed in the market as a food crop, and then the
quality seed would have been lost. The government bought back the
seed and is saving it for next year. These are the kinds of interventions
we are trying.
The success of such measures requires immediate action, and you
have to have contact with the state, because such things can’t
be done without their intervention.
The only solution is getting the government more involved, because
right now its involvement is very limited.
Or we educate farmers on how to grow their own seeds, and that
is why we are promoting this system and encouraging the farmer to
produce his own seed and keep it a high-quality seed and teaching
him how to store it properly to avoid damage and save it for next
year.
This project is funded by the government of India — next year,
funding will terminate, and we’ll have to analyse if the seed–village
system is working.
We also send seeds to breeders in different countries who want
them free of cost. We support their breeding programs and we also
do a lot of training — education training.
For example, right now I have four students working with me, three
PhD, one MSD. One is from Africa, two from India, and the MSD is
from Myanmar. We provide funding so that they can be trained and
become good scientists.
Our scientists write one or two papers every year — we don’t
copyright them. Also, we publish occasional papers from the institute.
We share our information on the website also. There you’ll
find every crop, facts, contacts, etc.
We are using all kinds of available media.
What kind of training do you do?
We have two types of training. One we do here, in which we invite
people from different countries to be in our training program. The
other is going to other countries. The advantage of that method
is that, for the travelling and accommodations expenses of one person,
we can train 20 or 30 people. One of my staff is going to Myanmar
in December to conduct training sessions on hybrid pigeonpea. We
can train a relatively large number of people on various aspects.
And some students whom we want to give degrees, we bring them over.
And some short-term training is also available.
For example, if a national programme wants someone to be trained
on diseases, then we can invite them for one month and give them
training on disease-control-management practices and things like
that.
Do you have any problems finding information?
In India, things are quite good compared to Africa — it’s
relatively easy to get jobs done here if you have the right contacts,
because education levels are very high here — that makes things
much easier for us.
Then why has Indian pulse production not increased at a higher rate?
Pulse production is increasing, but it hasn’t kept pace with
demand. Production for both chickpea and pigeonpea has increased,
but it just hasn’t been enough.
New varieties, for example, disease-resistant varieties —
are available that have really helped us increase total production.
Pod-borer damage has reduced after the release of Bt-cotton in the
country, because the pest is the same, and the insect now doesn’t
multiply there, and the total population reduces. This still has
not been researched enough to show it conclusively, but we feel
it’s quite obviously the case.
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