Improving the identification, handling and storage of “difficult” seeds ...

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Encourage and promote the conservation and use of traditional sorghum varieties.
Methodology
The planned field activity was designed as an on-farm participatory characterisation of Sorghum
germplasm. This entailed putting the characterisation and evaluation plots at selected farmers' fields
originally in the two target areas of Lusitu and Rufunsa in Siavonga and Chongwe districts
respectively. At the moment it is now being conducted at Rufunsa in Chongwe. Germplasm
material to be included and planted included local farmers varieties found in the target area, those
collected from other parts of the country and maintained in the genebank and commercially released
and improved varieties.
The implementation team at the field level included farmers, local agricultural extension,
Biodiversity and Conservation Network (BCN) a non-governmental organisation, NPGRC and
SPGRC staff. The extension staff assisted in the selection of participating farmers, data collection
together with farmers and crop monitoring. The farmer was responsible for all crop management
issues starting from land preparation and harvesting. All collaborators participated in planting and
evaluation of the general crop performance.
The activity was introduced to the community through local structures being used under the
Participatory Extension Approach (PEA) being used for to disseminate agriculture information
among farmers. The entry point was the Farmer Village Groups (FVGs) where the idea was
introduced and discussed with the aim of creating awareness and getting community acceptance and
ownership of the activity so that the participatory concept can be fully realised. The characters on
which data was to be collected were arrived at through discussions among all the players. The main
criterion used was relevance in distinguishing varieties both from the point of view of the farmer
and researcher.
The list of both morphological and agronomic characters used for data collection was agreed upon
by all players involved in conducting the trial. The scientifically derived descriptor lists for the
crops involved was used with possible modification of the descriptor states. Agronomic evaluation
included, plant vigour, general performance, yield potential and grain acceptability and others that
farmers consider important.
Lessons Learnt and Suggestions for Future Work
It was observed that focusing on one crop may not be quite attractive to the farmers and as such it
may be necessary to include one or two more crops that have local importance such as Pennisetum
glaucum and Vigna unguiculata. It may also be useful to have two adjacent plots of the same entries
but at two different management levels e.g. one with fertiliser applied and the other with no
fertiliser applied.
The farmers involved showed a lot of interest in the on-farm activity. This has the potential
therefore of being a major avenue for the promotion of on-farm conservation and use of local crop
diversity among traditional farming communities in Zambia.
Farmer Group discussions indicated that Sorghum sp. crop was relatively more appreciated than any
other cereal crop in the area because of its tolerance to drought. The white-grained sorghum
varieties were preferred to the brown grained when sorghum is used for nshima, a staple food in the
area. The improved varieties of sorghum namely Kuyuma and Sima were of interest to the farmers
because of their early maturity characteristic. Early maturing characteristic was important to the
farmers in the area because these genotypes tend to escape drought and lowers duration of bird
scaring. The genebank accession ZM5071 was late maturing but had larger grain size characteristic.