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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.

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.

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.

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