B. Chasekwa
Kutsaga Research Company, P.O. Box 1909, Harare, Zimbabwe
E-mail: bernard_chasekwa@kutsaga.co.zw
Kutsaga Research Company is an agricultural research organisation with 25 research officers specialising in tobacco research. The research officers conduct a diversity of experiments in agronomy, plant physiology, plant breeding, plant pathology, entomology and nematology. The company conducts approximately 125 experiments annually, most of which are on station but with quite a few on farm.
Kutsaga has a Biometrics Department with three biometricians, so all the research officers have access to biometrics help. In fact, all the experiments must pass through this department at all the critical stages such as experimental design, data analysis and report writing. All the biometricians are active members of the International Biometric Society (Group Zimbabwe) and therefore are in frequent interaction with other biometricians from other organisations both nationally and internationally. Training for scientists in biometrics is done almost entirely in house with occasional courses and on-the-job training. The biometricians, however, are relatively inexperienced and so the training is inadequate to fulfil all the needs. In the past some biometricians have been sent abroad for further training but this has become very expensive and unsustainable.
Data management is the responsibility of the Biometrics Department. Kutsaga has a computer network of 75 computers (workstations) with hard disks varying from 1 to 8 gigabytes in size. All research project outlines, raw data and results are stored on the network server with each research officer having read-only access. The main statistical software used by the Biometrics Department is the Windows 6 version of SAS. Some research officers, however, have other packages such as Minitab and Statistix, which they use mainly for data exploration.
