All Stories
For sustainable cacao farming in Colombia, going organic is not necessarily the only good answer
As noted in an analysis on the opportunities emerging from cacao production to contribute toward peace conducted by CIAT and Purdue University, cacao farmers in Colombia come in different forms. Some members of the International Climate Initiative (IKI)-funded Sustainable Land Use System (SLUS) Project team saw this reality for themselves when they recently visited cacao-growing areas in the departments of Caquetá and Cesar.
Brainstorming biodiversity monitoring
The outcomes will nurture new CIAT collaborations in Brazil and help us jointly build a biodiversity monitoring approach that can meet both CIAT’s and USAID’s objectives. Furthermore, the approach will be useful for other institutions specialized in biodiversity monitoring, as well as for the private sector as a way to evaluate the performance of their activities in the Amazon region. In fact, such a tool can benefit all sectors of society engaged in the difficult task of balancing the trade-offs between development and environmental conservation.
A plan to strengthen the agricultural sector in Colombia and help the region is underway
Agrosavia and the Bioversity-CIAT Alliance enter into a cooperation agreement. Plantain, banana, cocoa, pastures, restoration, circular farming, and Future Seeds are some of the research projects that will be strengthened in the next five years.
We bid farewell to Alba Lucía Chaves
This text is about a great scientist retiring from CIAT after working as a chemist at the Agrobiodiversity Area for 28 years. Here is the part of her life story spent in this beautiful campus.
A new world map rates food sustainability for countries across the globe
A global food system sustainability study builds the first map of its kind to score the sustainability of food systems, country-by-country. The study goes beyond usual questions of productivity and nutrition, and includes economic and social variables.
The Ministry of Agriculture of Japan Grants Award to CIAT Scientist
A Colombian researcher is to be awarded with the Young Scientist recognition of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of Japan (MAFF) and the Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences (JIRCAS).
Grass cushions farmer’s retirement
Bernard Gitobu spent most of his life working in bank, but deep down his heart, he knew he would retire into farming. After all, his parents were farmers.
Coffee value chain, meet the blockchain: cryptocurrency technology shows promise for the world’s favorite commodity
Everyone in the coffee industry craves information, perhaps even more than a morning jolt of caffeine. Across Uganda – one of the world’s top ten coffee producers – scientists, producers, industry, and the government collect data on coffee production. They do this to obtain valuable information, ranging from yield and prices to weather impacts and disease, and hopefully reduce risk in the process.
Simplyfying soil data management in sub-Saharan Africa
The idea of visualizing soil data at a glance electronically is exciting to many actors in agriculture and land-use planning. Previously, soil characterization required traveling to the field to collect soil samples and sending them to the lab for analysis. Digital maps, however, save the time (travel, carry soils samples to the lab and wait for results) before making crucial site-specific decisions.
Grass transforms farmers’ fortune
This was Rachel Kinyua’s experience before she met the team from the Piloting of Improved Brachiaria and Panicum Forages for Increased Livestock Production – a joint project between CIAT and the Netherlands Development Organization (SNV) in Kenya.