Research strategy

Before developing a research strategy one needs first to consider the agronomic, nutritional and morphological characters that smallholder farmers look for.

• Obviously they need strains of Napier grass that produce high yields and are used efficiently by cattle, e.g. strains with high digestibility.
• But taller strains may be particularly advantageous in certain environments than others.
• Smallholder farmers tend to prefer strains without hairy leaves since they are rough on their hands.
• Also animals do not find hairy strains as palatable as less hairy strains.

It is probable that there are different groups of accessions that share similar trait characteristics and some may even be virtual duplicates of each other. By applying multivariate methods to the range of morphological and agronomic characteristics of the available accessions it should be possible to group the accessions into different 'types' and select individual accessions within these different types for further evaluation.