Crop Adaptation and Improvement for Drought-Prone Environments

This book focuses on three important elements in the development of cereal and legume crops in semi-arid West Africa. The first section examines socioeconomic factors that affect the food system for these crops and contains an overview of crop production and consumption in the region. It then proceeds to discuss important inputs that affect system productivity: preferences for new seed varieties, yield response to fertilizer, counterfeit herbicides, climate information and the way farmers develop expectations about the weather events shaping cropping outcomes. A final chapter is dedicated to understanding urban consumer preferences for processed food products derived from pearl millet. The second section addresses the state of the art in phenotyping and the modeling of crop adaptation to dryland farming systems. Chapters focus on the regional network for phenotyping, high throughput phenotyping in field situations and of root architectures and crop ideotypes. In addition, empirical evidence is presented on presented on root and soil interactions and the effectiveness of UAVs to assess sorghum physiology. The third section examines the genetic diversity and improvement of dryland crops. Chapters focus on biodiversity and agricultural system sustainability, orphan crops such as fonio and the utilization of regional germplasm collection in the improvement of cowpea, groundnut pearl millet and sorghum.