seed-to-harvest package for lentil growers in West Asia is increasing yields, reducing harvest costs, and returning extra money to growers.
       In just the two areas that have so far
adopted the system, annual farm revenue has shot up by US$13.3 million. In West Asia and North Africa (WANA), lentil is an important source of protein in the cereal-based diets of the population. Lentil may be consumed whole, decorticated, decorticated and split, or ground into a flour. The most common method of preparing lentil is boiling, for example, the Indian dal, and the Middle Eastern Mujaddarah and lentil soup. It may also be deep fried and consumed as a snack, or combined with cereal flours in the preparation of such foods as breads and cakes. The crop also provides high-quality straw for animals, and helps to increase soil fertility through nitrogen fixation. Often it is a cash crop for farmers in the low-rainfall areas.
      The costs of growing lentils in the
WANA region have been rocketing because of an increasing population drift from the farmland to cities, which has created a tremendous shortage of agricultural labor in the region. Lentils have hitherto depended on hand labor, which is now so costly that the economics of this major cash crop were under threat.
      ICARDA decided early in its first decade to tackle the difficulties imposed by these labor constraints and to encourage the expansion of this environmentally sustainable legume-cereal rotation in the dry areas. With financial support from the German Agency for Economic Cooperation, low-cost machine harvest systems were developed and introduced for use by farmers in Syria and Turkey, but further research stopped until an assessment could be made of take-up and suc-

less, in some parts of Syria farmers are still using their traditional method of ridge planting which now needs to be changedto drilling into levelled land for easy use of the harvester.
      The harvesting options for these lentil growers are a double-knife cutter bar, a self- propelled mower, or a combine harvester. In Syria, farmers have mostly adopted the combine, while the double-knife cutter bar is dominating in Turkey. Harvest loss studies show that the double-knife cutter bar gives higher straw yield than the combine or self-
propelled mower, and is therefore preferred by those growers who wish to use their lentil straw for animal feed. Mechanization alone was not the total answer to improving output from the lentil crop in West Asia. Traditional lentil varieties had low stem strength and fell down, becoming unsuitable for mechanical harvesting where useable straw was an important by-product for farmers. ICARDA, in collaboration with national partners, produced new varieties, including Idlib 1 in Syria and Sayran 96 in Turkey, which meet the twin aims of good standing ability and resistance to mechanical damage.   
More lentil lines with good standing ability await release in both Syria and Turkey.
       The combination of improved varieties and the replacement of scarce and expensive hand labor with mechanized harvesting was shown in the survey to be worth 17-20% off harvest costs. For the grower, this is worth an extra US$100 per hectare, but for  the local economy in the two areas surveyed, it is worth a substantial US$13.3 million a year.



Dr Ashutosh Sarker is Lentil Breeder, and Dr Willie Erskine is Leader of the Germplasm Program, at ICARDA.

cess of the different harvesting machines that had become available. Yaahya El Saleh, a postgraduate student from Syria, who is working on harvest mechanization for his Ph.D. research, has now carried out this survey. With assistance from ICARDA, and the University of Aleppo and the General Organization of Agricultural Mechanization in Syria, and the universities of Cukurova and Adana in Turkey, he found that farmers have largely adopted the new mechanical harvest methods as well as the improved lentil varieties from ICARDA's breeding programs. There are, however, regional differences in the type of machine used.
     For mechanical harvesting to work best, planting method is important, as is leveled and stone-free land. Of the 171 lentil growers surveyed in Syria and Turkey, it was noted that about 90% of them grew lentil on flat, deep soil free of stone problems. Neverthe