Success from vegetable farming can come only if farmers know where the markets are, have sufficient skills to manage their crops well, and are willing to work with other players in the value chain such as traders, input suppliers, and transporters.
In Manyara, Arusha, Kilimanjaro and Tanga regions of Tanzania, WorldVeg is working with local communities to build family solar dryers for vegetables. The work, supported by the Amsterdam Initiative Against Malnutrition (AIM), provides people with the means to process vegetables for later use—and to explore the production of new food products to extend the vegetable value chain.
After demonstration gardens and seedling nurseries were established in Bambi and Mzuri villages in Zanzibar in June 2017, members of the WorldVeg Homegarden Scaling Project funded by USAID returned in July to assist farmers and community-based trainers with transplanting seedlings.
Field days offer excellent opportunities for farmers to share their experiences, sharpen their skills, and learn firsthand about new agricultural technologies.
Traditionally a space for families to grow fodder for household animals, backyards in Tajikistan are now flourishing with the support of a USAID project to promote small-scale protected cultivation of seedlings and fresh vegetables.
WorldVeg East and Southeast Asia/Oceania staff took part in Kasetsart University's (KU) “KU Hi-trees: A get-together for International Organizations” held on 16 June 2017 at the university’s Bangkok campus.
Sometimes the best things in the world can be found right in your own backyard! That's what Taiwan's UNIQUE Satellite Channel 58 discovered during a recent visit to World Vegetable Center headquarters in Shanhua, Tainan.
After the sequencing of the cucumber (Cucumis sativus), watermelon (Citrullus lanatus), and melon (Cucumis melo) genomes, bitter gourd became the fourth cucurbit species whose whole genome was sequenced. However, a comprehensive analysis of simple sequence repeats (SSRs) in bitter gourd, including a comparison with the three aforementioned cucurbit species, has not yet been published. We identified a total of 188,091 and 167,160 SSR motifs in the genomes of the bitter gourd lines ‘Dali-11’ and ‘OHB3-1,’ respectively. The SSR content, motif lengths, and classified motif types were characterized for the bitter gourd genomes and compared among all the cucurbit genomes.
Representatives from Taiwan seed companies, universities, and the Council of Agriculture joined in a recent "Information Exchange and Field Demonstration of Vegetable Breeding Research" at WorldVeg headquarters in Shanhua, Taiwan.
Although many smallholder farmers in India raise their own seedlings, there has been a gradual move toward purchasing seedlings from commercial nurseries, where plants can be grown in protected conditions. WorldVeg brought nursery industry representatives together to develop best practices for seedling production. --MORE--