Finger Millet

Finger millet [Eleusine coracana (L.) Gaertner] is an annual cereal high in calcium, zinc, iron, dietary fiber and protein, including essential amino acids. It is also gluten-free. These nutritional characteristics make finger millet an excellent food for people young and old, from weaning children and pregnant and nursing mothers to those suffering from diabetes and coeliac disease.

The crop is grown in Africa and South Asia and is used for making porridge, soups, bread, cakes, pudding and beer.

It is also drought tolerant, adapted to low-fertility soils and resistant to a wide range of pests and diseases, including in storage. This makes it a useful crop for small-scale farmers in areas facing increasingly erratic rainfall and where storage facilities are limited.

Challenges

But the crop faces considerable challenges. These include low yields – in Kenya, for example, finger millet yields commonly range between 0.5 and 0.75 tonnes per hectare, compared with up to 4 tonnes per hectare in yield trials – as a result of a historic lack of research attention, especially in breeding improved cultivars. This is also reflected in the crop’s susceptibility to diseases such as blast, caused by the fungus, Magnaporthe grisea, and the parasitic weed, Striga hermonthica or witchweed.

Research is urgently needed to address these challenges. BOLD is focusing on pre-breeding of the crop to boost the genetic diversity available to breeders and participatory evaluation of the diversity available.

Building on the Crop Wild Relatives Project and the Templeton Pre-breeding Project

The BOLD finger millet project builds on the work done on the crop under the Crop Trust's Crop Wild Relatives (CWR) Project, “Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change: Collecting, Protecting and Preparing Crop Wild Relatives,” and the Templeton Pre-breeding Project, “Safeguarding crop diversity for food security: Pre-breeding complemented with Innovative Finance.” The CWR Project supported missions to collect finger millet wild relatives in nine countries, including three in East Africa: Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda. Additionally, pre-breeding work led to the generation of 24 promising lines that were tested in field trials in six sites across Kenya and the release of three landrace-derived varieties showing earliness, resistance to lodging and tolerance/resistance to blast disease, Striga and drought. The Templeton Pre-breeding Project has crossed CWR with farmers’ preferred varieties to produce lines with better disease resistance and higher yield. Eleven lines that performed well in Ethiopia, four that performed well in Tanzania and five that did so in Uganda have been promoted to national performance trials in farmers’ fields in the three countries. Another two promising lines yielded almost twice as much as local “check” varieties in preliminary testing in Tanzania and were selected for advanced field trials. The Project also created a database that includes information on more than 1,600 seed samples, 84,000 genetic markers and 51 traits.