 Gwyddon i chi ddweud? Felly, os iddych yn rhywbeth a dweud o gyfleoedd gynhyrchu a'r rhaid i yw'r gweithio am y cyfnodd yma. Felly, rhaid i chi eich gweld o'r bwysig, a'r bwysig o'r bwysig. Felly, y cynhyrchu cyfan yw'r cyffredig a'r cyffredig o'r gweithio ar y cyflwr yma i'r cyffredig yma, a yn ymgyrchio ar gyfer genedig. Adently they considered for the 10 years and See from this time here he've accomplished a lot him published very well and has been recognised for a number of awards. There's something that could be said of many researchers that are key that they're sort of persona of the public persona and that is very closely applied to their subject of study. So Arerobic Rice and Bass come to mind as do Gnollian Dignor with Eulu Rice, and Gnollias Case Blast, Ymar Tin Gwment, with the superbag. For Grant, it is very clear where his research interests lie, and that is in association with Rodents. Nid yw'n gweld yn ddim yn ôl yn y rôl ariol, yn y grannau yw'r ystod yn y bydd y pethau yma. Mae'n ymgyrch i'w ddefnyddio'n ddechrau'r ddylch i'w ddyn nhw'n ddiadau, mae yw'r ddechrau a'u ddylch i'w ddechrau a'u ddau'n ddau'n ddau yn y diwrnod a'u ddega. Yn ychydigion i ddylch i dda'r ddau'r gweithredu, mae'n ddau'n ddau'n ddau'n ddau. But Grant has elevated the role to a very noble profession, and not only has he encouraged many others to follow in his footsteps, and I can see a number of putting rap people in the audience, both boys and girls, that he's encouraged the next generation of rap people. And I think what's remarkable is that he's done this at the same time as he's guided and steered what was a fairly large ship, the Irrigated Rise Research Consortium, which ran across 10 countries, and he convened and coordinated that over 10 years. And at the point when the donor interest was sort of signaling that they'd probably come to the end of their interest there, he was able to encourage others, conven the scientists, and have sort of a redirection of the work into the project Corry. And that led to a signal from the donor that, yes indeed, this was a novel topic, and it certainly sort of fit with their interests, and so it breathed new life into the work, Erie's work with national programs, which of course goes right to the very heart of what we need, and indeed we need much more of it. So I think the Corry app project is a good example, and that's what we're going to hear from today. So with that, I'll give you the comment. Thank you, David. I had purposely prepared a talk about mention of Rats, that already is sort of it, because it's interesting that even though I was employed at Erie to manage a project that Bob Ziegler always introduced me as the rap man, and I find that quite peculiar, because I'm not employed at Erie specifically to work on this. So today I want to take you on a journey and talk about Corry Gap. And as David mentioned, it's a project that's funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, SBC, and it's a project that's been going since 2013. And what I want to do today is give an overview of phase one of Corry Gap, that I want to talk about some of the work that we're doing, and give you a flavour of the multidisciplinary, and in some cases I would even say trans-disciplinary, because we're bringing together people who do not usually work together, and some highlights of the exciting progress, and then a few slides at the end on where next. So what is Corry Gap? Basically we're looking at trying to do two major tasks. One is to reduce rice yield gaps, and this is in the low land intensive system. It's the rice bonds of the countries we're working in. And we want to increase the environmental sustainability of rice production in these intensive systems. Now we're very closely aligned with our partners in six countries, and as I mentioned we're currently in phase one, and I'll come back to talk about where we are in relation to what happens beyond 2016. If you look at the vision of GRISP, and in the prelude to this seminar I did give the vision of Corry Gap, and we see that there's a very strong alignment. We're looking at reducing poverty, which is the first part of the vision of GRISP. We're looking to improve health, reduce the environmental footprint. I'll come back to that issue very briefly during my talk about what it means by that. The high quality research that I should go about saying, and also most importantly the partnerships, and the strong partnerships we have in the region. And the structure of Corry Gap is that we have an advisory committee, and that advisory committee is drawn from the six countries that we're working in. And for example three of them are the DGs of the Rice Research Institute, for example in Sri Lanka, in Indonesia, and also in Thailand, or definitely in Thailand. With each country we have a local champion. So Zuwa Zong in China, Ngunin, Subecti in Indonesia, Katasina in Sri Lanka. Naomi Twei, who initially was working with partner agricultural research, but now is a post-doc with the project for the last 12 months in Myanmar. Lada Biryankura in Thailand, and Fenven Nhu Zu in Vietnam. Now these people are really worth their weight in gold. When we're looking at trying to analyse whether the project is successful or not, often they say, oh, how strong are your partnerships? Well, if you've got someone who is really online and interested in what you're doing and has the buy-in, then they play an essential role in what happens in countries. And within each of these countries we have hubs, and this is shown in this graphic here. So in Indonesia, or in South Sumatra, and also in Jogjakarta and Setchwajada. So we have two sites in Indonesia. In Sri Lanka, in Koinodchi, and in Koinurugia. And so this one here is actually part of their main rice belt. And this one here is an area where the Tamil unrest was over the last decade. So it's an area that was chosen to see how it had stood over into these areas. Then in Myanmar initially we're just linking with other projects that we're involved in, in the AOE Delta, and also in Bago region. But now we have a new site just here in Le Padang, in Bago. In Thailand, the central plains of Thailand, the consawang. In Vietnam, there's a Mekong Delta, Solon An, Kentur, and Anjum. And up here in China it's just the one province, Guangdong province. But it has 110 million people. And this is actually one province, but it's four sites that we're working in Guangdong. We also are aligned with other projects and other donors. This is where the Irrigated Rice Research Consortium provides an umbrella arrangement. And these look at co-investment and linkages. And this is, for example, at national government level. And certainly people who have been involved, iriscientists and choregap, have been involved in lots of discussions recently in Vietnam, in Thailand, in Indonesia, where we're trying to see how we can leverage funds from those governments for research. In Myanmar we have two projects there, one's just finished. But also we have a project funded by the Australian government. And that has similar approaches in terms of adaptive research. In Vietnam we have a World Bank project, which is beginning now, although we probably won't be getting on the ground until February next year, called VNSAT. And we have a small project called Gift to Asia that Buyong Ha Di now co-ordinates. And that's focusing on capacity-building. So these are all linked with what we're doing with choregap. And the one at the bottom is a very important one, and that's the Sustainable Rice Platform, a Chinai Nation Development Program. They're going to have an annual meeting next week in Alabang. And what we're doing in the field provides the on-the-ground activities at the moment with the SRP. This presentation I'm going to give acknowledgements up front, because a lot of the slides I'm presenting, you'll notice a number of them I have at the bottom, some acknowledgement as to who provided them. Haven't done it for all the slides, but most of them. But this is the team that's been involved with choregap. And we also have an impressive team of NRS staff. And as I mentioned, they're NARS partners. And I only mentioned on the covering slide in terms of the structure of choregap, who are the key partners. But we have a number of people in each country also involved in our work. And just recently, we've got Sudir, Krishna and Ando will be involved with certain portions of their time in choregap. And I'd like to highlight here how we do have a younger generation in terms of Alex, Peter, Naomi, Krishna and Ando who are currently postdocs here at Erie. And they provide a very important energy to the project of choregap. With choregap, we're making sure we're aligned with the national priorities, the national programs at the moment in relation to the lowland irrigated cropping system. The other thing I should mention in terms of the people involved that we get feedback. So we've had James Quilty has been also giving us some advice and also we've had input from the rice breeding as well. So in Vietnam, they have a situation now where muc phai nun jiang, which is a carryover of one must do five reductions in our work in Vietnam with the IRRC. It's now seen as being adopted as a national program of best practice. So there's a presidential decree and that's important because it means that the extension agencies can put funding into those activities. And that's now the basis of this new project funded by the World Bank. Farmers are forming cooperatives, they'll get support but they only get support if they can demonstrate that they are following best practice. And the best practice is the one must do five reductions. In Indonesia is a new initiative called GP PTT and that's basically looking at acceleration of their current integrated crop management ITM. In Thailand it's aligned with a national cost reduction initiative in China. They have a program there called three controls technology and it's now got alternate way of drawing link to that. And we're looking at a strong focus on reducing fertiliser use and also reducing pesticide use. In Myanmar we're setting the development of best practices and in Sri Lanka they're one of the key interests there. They really sort of ticks the box when we start talking about environmentally sustainable rice production. So we are keeping a view of what is happening in each of these countries and probably any second time I go in country I will meet with policy makers at a higher level to get a feel for what is developing from a natural resource management in these intensive lowland systems. So we're well positioned to fast track the outcomes of the project and what we've said in terms of our ultimate goal is we're looking to see if we can improve the livelihoods of half a million farmers by 2022. And that's what we're sort of aiming towards. Phase one, the first four years, STC were keen to build what we've done with IRRC and in a couple of the countries they're looking to see if we can have outreach. But in the others they also appreciated that we also need to do some basic research. Whereas in phase two there will be a much stronger focus on the outreach of the results from that research. So on to what, where and when. And what we have here, so just trying to show a schematic so we have the countries here, China, Indonesia and different colours going down and across here some of the activities we've been doing. So the needs assessment were undertaken in all countries in 2013. We have a new site now in Myanmar and that needs assessment has just been completed. And then from that needs assessment it gives a good understanding of what we should be thinking about in terms of rolling out. And also we undertook household surveys and the household surveys have been done at different stages. We weren't going to do one in Vietnam initially because we had a data set from 2011 but it was in Anjong and we were working primarily in Can Thu and Wang An so we decided we would do one this year. This gives you an example, an overview of what's been done in terms of our household surveys. So we have Rahal, Dick and Anan who left just recently and now Aralee has taken over this data set and this gives you a feel. This is our baseline data. But the baseline data we also looked at villages that we'll be working closely with and villages which we've seen as being our untreated or called check villages. So when we do our follow-up surveys in phase 2 of Corry Gap we'll have before and after and with and without to look at what the impacts would be. Now part of what we're doing this all leads through to what we call adaptive research of best practices. So apart from some of the work that Sarah's been doing primarily with the ecological indicators most of our work is done in farm, in the villages, in the countries the six countries that are our partners. And so I'll go through what we mean by adaptive research as our model. What it is, is we do these needs assessments rat and rule appraisals and then from that we're going to do our more detailed quantitative household surveys and I'll say details on these surveys take like two hours to do. And then from this we select our technologies based on the feedback. So in each country some of our lead technologies that we're introducing that are new they will differ from place to place. Then we'll do adaptive research where we are leading the trials. We will set up the trials we'll make sure the technology and the new approaches are implemented correctly and follow set protocols we established field demonstration sites for the farmers to come and look at what is happening a couple of times during the growing season and at the end of the growing season we review the results for the farmers. And we do this usually most of the sites have two crops a year some sites like in John Ficata they have five crops in two years and we do that at the end of each of the cropping seasons. And from that interaction with the farmer groups we then select technologies again where they want to do a bit more because often they say that was fantastic what you've done what else do you have what problems in this particular area with water management or whatever it may be and then we'll so we go through this iterative process then we'll get to a stage where the farmers are confident that these technologies are ones that they want to start adopting they will then lead their own trials and there we take a step back so farmers are implementing it and we're there as advisers or our counterparts in the country are there as advisers and again we review the results at the end of each cropping season and when there's clear that these results are having quite an outcome a positive outcome then that gets through where we're informing policy and also the national extension system so this is our adaptive research approach and in each cropping season we could be doing something quite different from the previous cropping season quite different from doing standardised work research funds and all this is done as I mentioned before in the context of natural resource management best practice so what are the attainable yield gaps and this is some very interesting data and there's actually quite surprising data when it starts coming through this is the data from our household surveys what we have here is this area the green bars refer to the top 10% of the farmers what are the yields of those top 10% this here the blue refers to what is the mean of the particular farmer group and in these cases this is drawn from four villages in any particular location so you see it the gaps are quite large in wherever we work and it ranges from about 20% up to about 40% okay so given that background what's been happening in terms of the progress one particular study has been a study that's involved Alex Stewart and he's worked well initially he was working with Takahiro Seito who left us earlier this year and with our colleagues in Vietnam particularly in Kentur and there we're looking at three different management approaches one is called good agricultural practice which is called Viet, GAP or global GAP we're applying that who have been accredited then we have others which are following another approach called small farmer large field and then farmers who are doing their conventional practice and for each management approach we had a treatment one must do five reductions which was managed by us and then we looked at the usual practice that would be farmer managed so that could be looking at what the GAP approach at the moment is for those farmer groups versus where we're applying what we see is the best practice fire replicates so five by three treatments by the control and treatment so we've got 30 plots each of one hectare and from that this is just a snapshot I'm not giving you a snapshot so the more detailed work we'll obviously hopefully get a presentation from Alex next year we'll have all this data analysed but what we can see here on this axis here we have the profit and these are the three groups GAP, small farmer large field and conventional practice and you see it as quite a change quite an increase in profit if we're looking at adopting the best practice of one must do five reductions if you look at what's happening in China and their focus on yield gaps and there it's looking at whether they adopt what they call three controls technology and they also have what is called partial adopt and this is data from one of our colleagues who we actually provided funds for at the end of IRRC Rufa Hu from Beijing and they looked at farmers from a number of villages in Guangdong province and they have three different categories non-adopters, partial adopters and full adopters and you see here that they are the yield gap so these are the main yields here and these are the yield gaps based upon the household surveys at Rufa Hu had done so it's very positive comparing those which we've seen as full adopters versus those which are non-adopters then you're looking at about a 17.5% closing of the yield gap so from the best practices we're also moving through to post harvest so I'll be touching on some of the work we're doing in terms of learning alliances but there we're looking at a solar bubble dryer a flatbed dryer super bags and also we'll start and look at laser levelling and also straw management in Vietnam and straw management particularly for use of growing mushrooms and bringing this data together and best practices both with NRM and post harvest is an approach called the field calculator and that will be used across all countries but at the moment we've been working primarily in Vietnam to validate the approach and we'll go on to consider that so the field calculator is an approach like a decision support system trying to pull things together and provide recommendations on sustainable management practices so here we're trying to see what is happening in terms of profit and the economic approaches but also trying to look at what's happening in relation to some of the ecological considerations what we're looking at is trying to integrate the results coming out of adaptive research from the agronomists who are leading that work through combining also information from the household surveys and in Vietnam for example there's particularly those farmers involved with GAP good agricultural practice and extensive farm adherence so how are we tracking if we start looking at that well in Vietnam what we're looking at there was trying to do adaptive research but looking at making sure we're collecting the requisite information so we can clear it into the field calculator so this is work that Alex and Tucket Hero Sato did and I've sort of described the study earlier on where we're looking at the GAP and it's very important again that we're demonstrating these practices to farmers and we're getting feedback we'll meet with the farmers at the end of the each crop each season and this is what the field calculator can generate a spider diagram we're looking at here this one is sort of the standard if we're looking at what is happening in the conventional production areas and if we then look at these red areas means there's a reduction so the reduction in labour costs reduction in fertiliser costs so they're moving in and this red band is where we've got the treatment which is the one must do five reductions so that's the best practice for being promoted in country in Vietnam and the Mekong Delta and we've also had reductions in costs such as irrigation and reduction in pesticide use so overall you can see because of these reductions in input use the profit has been quite impressive also what's impressive is the fact that these fertiliser, irrigation, pesticide use those reductions are seen as being positive for the environment how positive that is is that's where we're going to sort of pass across to Sarah and we'll go down to look at some of the factors that she's looking at in terms of those indicators the yield was slightly higher it's not sort of similar in each of the places we're looking at so that's a very positive result we've had a very positive result in terms of income for the farmers and it looks as though the indicators are that we're also having a positive response in terms of environmental sustainability if you look at Thailand there the result is even more stunning in terms of profit although each thing there we've had a bit of reduction in yield and so we need to understand what's happening there turns out one of the sites did have a particular problem with one of the pathogens as I understand and so we'll follow that through so just one particular season and we'll be following this through for at least 23 seasons so underpinning all this different disciplinary work we have these cross-cutting approaches and the first is looking at the environmental indicators and I'll go into that in a little bit more detail and there's also a bit of research on biodiversity the second cross-cutting one is looking at monitoring, evaluation and learning on gender-related issues and I'm not going to go into gender specifically here because we do integrate it within what we do in each of the communities we also want to understand the key players and the factors in the value chain and this is using an early aligns approach that Martin Goumett has been promoting and also Matty Dymont and Peter Ritza are in their work on the socio-economics looking at the value chains and we are also, as I mentioned earlier aligning with national policy initiatives and we regularly engage with decision makers so these are cross-cutting and we now look at the environmental indicators in returning for the GRISP vision there's two very clear statements where reducing the environmental footprint enhancing the ecosystem resilience of rice production that gives us a warmth in a glow when we read that but what are we doing at Erie in relation to whether we we are actually achieving this particularly in these intensive lowland systems which are the rice bowls and the rice bowls of today but also the rice bowls of future generations so we make sure that we got sustainable actions happening in terms of the management of these systems so in our proposal we mentioned the phrase ecological footprint and we are saying that we are going to target this food