Closing The Yield Gap

The yield gap describes the difference between the yield a rice variety could theoretically achieve under optimal genetic and agronomic conditions, and the yield that smallholder farmers actually harvest in their fields. Even elite rice varieties with strong genetic potential often fall far short of this potential once they are grown under real world conditions, where diseases, pests, limited access to inputs, and variable growing conditions all take their toll.

Closing this gap is one of the most direct ways to improve food security for small scale producers. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, insufficient domestic rice production already forces countries to import rice at significant economic cost, an estimated $3.6 billion in 2008. Every percentage point by which the yield gap can be narrowed translates directly into more rice grown locally, more income for smallholder families, and less dependency on costly imports.

At Healthy Crops, we address this gap not by developing entirely new rice varieties from scratch, but by improving elite varieties that farmers already know, trust, and grow.

Rather than introducing entirely new rice varieties, which can take farmers years to trust and adopt, we focus on improving the elite varieties that smallholder producers already cultivate. These varieties often carry decades of local adaptation and farmer acceptance, but their yield potential remains constrained by specific genetic bottlenecks. Using genome editing, we introduce targeted improvements into these existing varieties, preserving the traits that farmers value while unlocking additional yield.

This approach allows us to work closely with national breeding programs and agricultural research institutes to identify which local elite varieties would benefit most from targeted genetic improvement. Once a suitable variety and target trait are identified, we apply the same precision genome editing methods that already underpin our disease resistance work, adapted here to increase yield potential rather than to confer resistance.

Kamala is the first elite variety we have improved using this approach, and it serves as a model for how the method can be applied to other locally important rice varieties in the future.