Tomato grafting in Ethiopia

With just a bit of bicycle tubing or a little clip, farmers can produce vigorous seedlings to grow new business opportunities.

Vegetable grafting is a widely practiced technology in many countries, but it is relatively unknown in Africa. Grafting tomato scions, or tops, onto disease-resistant eggplant or tomato rootstocks prevents diseases caused by bacterial wilt, root-knot nematodes (RKN), fusarium wilt, and verticillium wilt, and abiotic stresses such as soil salinity and waterlogging.

The WorldVeg Ethiopia office, in collaboration with Joytech, a fresh herb exporter with greenhouses near Addis Ababa, recently organized a one-day tomato grafting training session under the FCDO project at Wonji town. The training took place at a farmer’s field where tomatoes grafted on nine eggplant rootstocks and one tomato rootstock are being evaluated. Mr. Abdella Negash, Director of Horticulture from Ethiopia’s Ministry of Agriculture, officially opened the training. He appreciated that WorldVeg was providing grafting training for vegetables, as grafting mostly is used for fruit trees in Ethiopia.

The theoretical framework of grafting was presented and a short video on the practice was screened. Participants discussed the advantages of grafting, how to raise healthy rootstocks and scions, ensuring grafts are compatible, the key processes of grafting, preparation of a healing/grafting chamber, best conditions in the grafting chamber, hardening-off seedlings before moving them to the open field, and the cost of grafting overall. Participants then practiced grafting tomato seedlings themselves using latex tubes and clip techniques.

The participants had many questions about grafting. For instance, one farmer asked: “Once I harvest seeds from a grafted tomato, will I need to graft again? Or will the seed I collected be resistant to soil-borne disease and there is no need of grafting again?” This query engendered a lively debate; some farmers thought seeds collected from grafted tomato could be used and there would be no need to graft again. Others said no, we have to graft every time. Finally, the WorldVeg team explained that grafting does not transfer any genes or genetics from the rootstock to the scion, so it is necessary to use freshly grafted seedlings whenever there is a problem with soil-borne pathogens.

Joytech representatives Mr. Jagdish and Mr. Yitagessu showed participants how to raise healthy seedlings and stressed the importance of using up-to-date technologies. They screened a short video of Joytech’s seedling production facilities.

Immediately after the training participants visited the grafted tomato plants in the farmer’s field. There they saw ungrafted tomato, perfectly grafted tomato (a graft union with good fruits) and poorly grafted tomato, where the graft union was partially covered with soil, causing the scions to produce roots. The participants were surprised and delighted to see tomato plants grafted on eggplant produce beautiful tomato fruit.

Jibicho Geleto from the Melkassa Agricultural Research Center and a PhD student at Hawassa University mentioned that his center had tested pepper grafting some years back without success. After the training, he realized their problems occurred during the healing process in the grafting chamber, and now knows how to avoid the issue in the future.

Mrs. Meseret Shiferaw from the Ministry of Agriculture’s Horticulture Development Technology Transfer group said grafting is an attractive technology youth groups can adopt to develop seedling businesses. She’s looking forward to future collaboration to promote grafting throughout the country.