Participatory Plant Breeding in Iran: Report of the first five years (2006-2011) Salvatore Ceccarelli with M. Rahmanian, K. Razavi, R. Haghparast, M. Salimi and A. Taheri 1 Participatory Plant Breeding in Iran: Report of the first five years Contents Contents ...........................................................................................................................................2 Background .....................................................................................................................................2 The partners .....................................................................................................................................2 The area and the crop .......................................................................................................................3 Results .............................................................................................................................................4 Background Beginning in 1996, ICARDA has used Participatory Plant Breeding (PPB) as a breeding strategy which on one side serves more efficiently those areas and those farmers which already benefited from conventional, i.e. centralized and non participatory, plant breeding, and on the other side reaches the most marginal and neglected areas as well as the people living there. Since its inception in Syria, PPB has been tested successfully in Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Algeria; in the last five countries the programs are currently active (in Syria the program was discontinued because of the situation in the country) on a number of crops (barley, bread and durum wheat, lentil, chickpea and faba bean) and they have different types of impacts ranging from a) varieties developed and the consequent economic benefit to farmers, b) farmer (men and women) empowerment, c) changes in policies (e.g. change of the variety release system in Jordan), d) institutionalization of participatory plant breeding as in Yemen, partly in Morocco, Jordan, Algeria and Eritrea), and e) capacity building of the scientists associated with the projects. Through informal contacts with CENESTA, an Iranian NGO, and informal discussion with the AREO provincial office in Kermanshah, in 2007 we started a Participatory Breeding Program in two areas, namely Garmsar, an area with irrigated agriculture where CENESTA was already working, and Kermanshah (about 800 km south of Tehran). In this report we will refer the progresses and the achievements of the Garmsar program during its first five years. The partners The Centre for Sustainable Development (CENESTA) is a non-governmental, non-profit organization dedicated to promoting sustainable community- and culture-based development. It works closely with farmers in Iran, including the Group for the Sustainable Development of Garmsar Plain, a farmers' cooperative in Garmsar. The initial donor of the PPB project was the Challenge Program for Water and Food (CPWF) of the CGIAR. CENESTA led a small grants project as a part of the CPWF entitled "Out scaling and up scaling community-based water management strategies in the Karkheh River Basin". The project focuses on PPB (for rain-fed wheat and barley) as a strategy for better use of water for food production with the twin aims of building field experience on PPB in Iran and also calling for a more supportive policy and legislative framework. This project was supported by ICARDA, the Department of Agriculture of Kermanshah province, 2 and the Dryland Agriculture Research Institute of Iran (Sararood Station). As the project grew, support was secured from the Global Crop Diversity Trust for the evaluation of landraces in Kermanshah and Garmsar in 2009 (to 2011). In 2010 IFAD began supporting the project in terms of using agricultural biodiversity and farmers' knowledge to adapt to climate change (to 2013). The area and the crop The trials conducted in the cropping season 2006-2007 were the results of consultations with farmers of the two communities conducted during 2006. The consultations were organized and facilitated by CENESTA. Garmsar is a town (with its outlying villages) located about 110 km to the south-east of the capital of Iran, Tehran. It is in the province of Semnan and is a part of the Hableh Rood river basin, between the Alborz Mountains and the central desert of Iran. It has a total population of about 80,000 and is one of the most important agricultural areas in Semnan province. Its most important agricultural products are cotton, wheat, barley, pomegranates, and melons (there are several renowned traditional varieties). Garmsar has about 30,000 hectares of farm land of which about 8,000 is dedicated to irrigated wheat (with an average yield of 3,800 kg/ha) and 8,700 has to irrigated barley (average yield of 3,400 kg/ha). In addition to numerous industrial livestock units, the surrounding area is the wintering ground of several pastoral clans. The crop initially used in the program was irrigated barley and for this reason the original germplasm was obtained from a special nursery prepared at ICARDA for the Irrigated areas of Iran. Meeting in Garmsar Results First year (2006 – 2007) The barley PPB trials The first cycle of PPB in barley started in Garmsar with 70 barley lines selected in 2006 from an ICARDA special nursery for irrigated conditions grown by the Seed and Plant Production Institute 3 (SPII) in Karaj. Since during the consultation the farmers quoted resistance to lodging as one of their more desirable traits, only lines resistant to lodging under the high input management conditions of Karaj were included in the trial. The trial was planted by five farmers around the city of Garmsar (the lines were planted in a different sequence in each farmer’s field) and were handled by the farmers themselves. At flowering, we met with farmers to discuss how to conduct the selection: issues discussed ranged from the appropriate time to do selection, the frequency of selection (whether selection should be done just once or more than one time, the criteria to use, and the scoring method. Eventually the farmers decided to conduct selection only once, and decided to score a number of traits such as tillering, height, spike length, number of spike per m2 and lodging using, for each character a score from 0 = bad to 10 = highly desirable. Discussing Selection Methods in Garmsar Most of the field work, from planting to harvesting to threshing to some of the note taking and data computerization was done by farmers with minimum inputs from scientists. Planting Harvesting 4 Threshing Measuring Grain yield Preparing seed samples for 1000 kernel weight Preparing data files for analysis Harvesting was done manually and threshing was done using locally available equipment adapted to the purpose by the farmers. Eventually, grain yield and 1000 kernel weight were measured using balances borrowed from local shops. Table 1 Mean, minimum and maximum grain yield (kg/ha) of 70 barley lines grown in 5 locations in 2006-2007. Location Mean Min Max Qods 5446 5194 5847 Malijan 6657 5884 7782 Sarasyab-e Kardevan 5582 1633 10848 Mandulak 2574 0 6652 Ghaleh Kharabeh 4860 4669 5156 Average grain yield varied considerably both between locations (from about 2.5 t/ha in Mandulak to 5 about 6.5 t/ha in Malijan) and within locations (from about 0.5 t/ha in Qods and Ghaleh Kharabeh to nearly 2 t/h in Malijan, and to between 6 and 8 t/ha in the other two locations) (Table 1). Selection was conducted by an average of between 6 and 7 farmers including between 2 and 4 women in four of the five locations. At the end of the process the farmers used the results of the analysis conducted on the total biomass, grain yield, harvest index and 1000 kernel weight, as well as their own visual selection to select the best entries. Furthermore, they decided to select the best entries in each individual location regardless of their performance in the other locations. This was a consequence of the large genotype x locations interaction (Fig. 1); locations 3 and 5 ranked the genotypes in opposite way, while locations 1 and 2 ranked the genotypes in an almost identical way. Fig. 1 Biplot of grain yield of 70 breeding lines of barley measured in 5 locations in Garmsar (L1 = Qods; L2 = Malijan, L3 = Sarasyab-e Kardevan; L4 = Mandulak and L5 = Ghaleh Kharabeh ) in 2006-2007. Farmers’ preferences differed considerably between locations (Fig. 2): even though lines such as line 1, 4, 20 and 58 received a high score in all locations, farmers selected also those lines which received a high score in specific locations. The final selections included almost all the lines which received a high score but also a number of lines, such as lines 5, 8 and 22 which received a low score and were therefore selected because of their yield. 6 Fig. 2. Biplot of farmers’ preferences for 70 breeding lines of barley measured in 5 locations in Garmsar (L1 = Qods; L2 = Malijan, L3 = Sarasyab-e Kardevan; L4 = Mandulak and L5 = Ghaleh Kharabeh). The lines in red are those selected for further testing in 2008. The activities of the first year resulted in a total of 37 lines selected for a second year testing. Of these, four lines were selected in four of the five locations, five in three locations, eight in two locations, and 19 in only one location. One improved variety, Rihane-03 was added as a check in all five locations. Second year (2007 – 2008) The barley PPB trials In 2007-2008 the farmers evaluated the 37 barley lines selected