Thank you very much for that Ola and welcome to everybody, very happy to see you all here. Also wishing to say that we are recording the session so that we can also the people who could not join for whatever reason now can still see it later because we are very happy to have an introduction from Robert and I think also Bika is joining us from Vietnam but we will see about that later. We have we had a team from Wageningen visiting Vietnam they just came back last night that could also be a reason why it was a bit tight to get everything lined up just before Christmas but without further ado we like to hear from Robert and then please keep your questions you may put them in the chat so that we can answer them afterwards and also we can have some more discussion afterwards. Robert the floor is yours. Thank you very much. So my name is Robert van Loo. I work at the plant breeding in Wageningen University in Research. I'm the research group leader of a group working on abiotic stress tolerance in different crops, potato, tomato, barley but also quinoa and quinoa is in my heart already for many years and one of the reasons is that it is an enormously high salt tolerance so that's also the reason for this talk and the developments that we have together with Dr. Bika. I couldn't join the mission to Vietnam last week but I was there in November when we gave a NAFIC training course with people from seven universities in Vietnam also talking about quinoa and there's also where I met Dr. Bika and we are working together with her to see how we can do feasibility studies in the Mekong Delta. So today I want to show you what the crop is. Some results on high salinity conditions and also a little bit about the situation in the Mekong Delta where we think that quinoa could be a great opportunity to provide food security and income to farmers. Okay that as an introduction. On this slide you see a field of quinoa in Europe and a very famous person also in there which is a person in France that helped us to start commercialization of quinoa in Europe of our own varieties and I will show also a little bit more on that. Before I forget I should give some acknowledgement to people that we are working with and that Bika is one Dr. Long at Hanoi Vietnam National Agriculture University but we also work together with a company a startup company in Wageningen called Radical Crops where also former PhD student of us works now that worked on salt tolerance in quinoa and Matthijs Peters an MSc graduate that now is doing a PhD in quinoa so those are also very important in this field. Jason Abbott is the person in France who started up the commercial use of our varieties in Europe and of course many colleagues at plant breeding. A further work has been supported by top sector from the Netherlands the knowledge based project that also is linked to these delta talks knowledge based program 35 and then the project deltas under pressure and NAFIC also the organization that supports international collaboration in education by the universities Netherlands new universities. So we developed quinoa for Europe of course it doesn't come from Europe it comes from South America and there it's grown in the high end as and it's also grown in Southern Chile for example so very different latitudes and yeah we started to develop quinoa as one of the new crops that could be the fourth crop or could be used in crop diversity in Europe and that is now a business that is going from let's say 5000 hectares slowly moving to 10 000 hectares in Europe it's not that big yet but it's commercially viable and one of the reasons was also that we have been breeding day length adapted along with latitude what is it latitude adapted varieties that grow and mature well on the European conditions from Spain to Denmark even but we also want to see really now how we can make use of this trait of quinoa that it is so enormously salt tolerant initially you think let's not do that it's so difficult on the saline conditions so we started up production in Europe on the non-saline conditions but now we want to see how we can really get this trait of quinoa going here you see Jason Abbott and me at the segregating population of quinoa we started crossing and breeding and inbreeding and made a whole set of varieties that are now being used in Europe and are also now being tested in Vietnam so a little bit about what quinoa is and first thing to know is it has minor yield loss up to 10 ds per meter which is an enormously high salinity level and I think that most of you might know but this is about 20 percent of seawater so most crops really wilt and die and and don't produce anything and certainly I don't know any food crops that can do this the potential you know a grain yield as we see it also in Chile for example is up to five ton per hectare in commercial production it's really not the standard production but it's what's possible that's under good conditions we don't see any leaf damage up to 50 ds per meter which is sea water level if you build it up gradually it stays green sea doesn't fall out whatever it doesn't grow anymore then but it doesn't die so if you have a drying out situation in soils that have an initially rather low salinity level it will increase a lot when the water runs out quinoa will not die from that standard farm yields in Europe are between two and three and a half tons per hectare so certainly not that enormously good figure that we see in Chile but in Chile standard yields are between four and five tons per hectare now the grain yield of most sovereign time lines at 20 ds per meter is still above two hectares two tons per hectare which is enormously high no other food crop can do this I think and quinoa can therefore be a staple food crop in salinity affected areas of course people don't know how to use quinoa maybe so what is now this is what the crop looks like it's a main stem most of the time with the head in which the seeds are it can branch to compensate if there are sort of low densities in the field or when you want to use low density seed cropping it has very small seeds and I'm stuck now it doesn't react to my page down ah there we are rather amazing the is this yeah there we are okay next one is this this is how quinoa grows in Europe you can see it clearly is an arable crop sometimes higher sometimes lower in in plant height but you can always use combine harvesting or other forms of harvesting with swatting for example here on the right you see how small the seeds are but you can get very high yields still now why is quinoa interesting as a food I think in the 80% 88% dry matter you find quite a high percentage of protein there is a little bit of plant oil there there is starch but it's less than in cereals and it has a good set of essential amino acids I will show a little bit later there are minerals there a lot of iron for example dietary fiber one of the interesting things is there are no gluten of course rice also has no gluten but compared to rice protein content is much better and yeah it's healthy but I think that most importantly it's also tasty it could easily replace rice in recipes and yeah it has this very high salt tolerance and low wilting point which is associated to some extent because if you get the high salt concentration in the soil water the water potential is also very very negative and can be up to minus 40 for example 30 and then that will be about the point where you know it starts wilting the crop cycle can be very variable depending on the variety three to seven months so that is one of the things that needs to be yeah tested what is the best crop cycle length so the variety selection for a certain region is very important it can mature grow and mature under various day length situations the high end those materials in Bolivia Peru Ecuador need 12 hour day length the southern chili materials and also materials that we have developed for Europe will be very very quick normally at 12 hours so they will be too short crop cycle they need day lengths of 14 to even up to 20 hours a day and we also have to select therefore and develop maybe even the right varieties for areas like the Mekong Delta where day length is usually close to 12 hours now this is one of the things why I think that Kinoa might also be interesting not only for its salt tolerance and much better than rice could but also because the nutritional quality is good in terms of energy it's about the same but in protein it's much more there is a little bit more fat there which is healthy plant oils there are minerals in there starch is somewhat less and fiber is better and protein quality is also pretty pretty good so interestingly if you take a hundred gram of product of Kinoa then you will have 15 grams of protein if you take a hundred gram of chicken fresh chicken of course so non-cooked that will be 20 grams of protein so it's actually close to a meat product in that sense and if you look at a lot a lot of meat replacers then they usually get about 15 grams of protein so Kinoa already has that on its own with uncooked Kinoa amino acid quality is very good all the essential amino acids are there and they are there in greater amounts than in rice and some of them are better than legumes certainly better amino acid composition in terms of essential amino acids compared to wheat for example here it's about the amounts not so because the protein content is higher in Kinoa than in rice of course the amino acid concentrations themselves are also higher but you can see there's a lot of life signs so that's a very important essential amino acid if you look at the mineral composition you can see it also has much more minerals than for example white rice especially iron then something about yield levels you can get these very nice high yields consistently in in chili but that's a very good cultivation area and they've optimized their Kinoa production system enormously in the Netherlands on the conventional farming we are in between two and twenty two thousand and two thousand eight hundred kilos per hectare with the existing varieties today we have some new varieties that that are even outperforming this i will come to that also later we have developed an F1 hybrid seed production system and and have a set of experimental F1 hybrids that outperform standard varieties in breadline varieties by 20 30 40 percent even so that we have consistent yields now with these F1 hybrids of three and a half thousand kilo per hectare but that's not what is now standardly found in practice yet that is there to be to come some cultivation aspects I think it's very important that people learn a little bit about Kinoa before I go into the salt tolerance sowing rates are 10 to 15 kilos the crop cycle length is variable because varieties can be different in that day length sensitivity but it can vary between 90 and 200 days depending on variety and conditions which also mean that you can always find a variety that's adapted to a certain opportunity in the crop cycle length 500 millimeter of water should be sufficient for this five tons per hectare but yields are still very nice and and two to three tons per hectare when you only have 300 millimeter of rainfall of water available there is a nitrogen yield yield need because of course if you have protein in your brain then you remove nitrogen and it's about 50 kilograms of nitrogen per hectare per ton of grain and that is also something to fine tune you can do row sowing some people are even planting but usually we use sowing with 15 to 55 centimeter row distances weeding is very important we don't use any herbicides in Europe in Chile herbicides are possible that's also one of the reasons why they have these enormously high yields flowering starts one to two months after sowing you can do combine harvesting you can also say if you you have dry periods and you want to harvest early then you can do swatting that means cutting the stems and putting everything back on the stems and letting it dry on the land and then take it up and do threshing in a separate cycle standard combine harvesting treasures can get almost clean seed but a little bit of further seed cleaning is necessary that uses very standard methods like you would use in other seed crops some economic figures today the demand is not yet enormously high if you compare it to rice or wheat or whatever but there is a strong increase in demand and currently the production and consumption is about 250 000 tons farmers price in the EU are 70 to 90 euro cents per kilo wheat is less but also the value of quinoa is much higher than wheat so with this kind of price farmers are really persuaded to grow quinoa for let's say the wholesale trade my market prices are about one and a half to three euro per kilo that's still quite high higher than the current global rice price which is i believe 60 cents which is also extremely high for rice and this of course is one of the things that that needs some improvement it at this kind of price levels and so therefore going for even higher productive quinoa is important but it's also possible and certainly when we look at salt affected areas where no other crops are possible quinoa can give additional yield that isn't and food production and it might be that then the the farming costs might also be lower because land costs are lower so cost price and salinity affected areas will be lower because alternative crops are not possible now then a little bit about how the plant looks and what we do in breeding you see a head of of quinoa here a close up of a colored one and each of these little flowers this is a little flower produces one seed so in breeding it means that crossing is not that easy because it's very difficult to remove all the male function from all these flowers so that's also a reason why normally varieties are in bread lines so selfing is easy 90% selfing crossing is possible we know the genome sequence we published that together with Jarvis and a lot of other people in nature so that helps a lot in the genomic and the genetic tool development and what is now important today is that we have F1 hybrids so we now have female lines so they lack these yellow parts which are the enters that produce the pollen that's the male function so we have all female flowers and then we can use another line as male line to fertilize the female ovule that's residing here and with that we can get fully pure F1 hybrids and we now have seen that those hybrids are having they are more robust have really higher yield and that is going to be a future for quinoa we think now here you see a field trial you see can have different colors and different maturity times different heights so there's a lot of variation also in quinoa here you see an example of a salt trial so I think now we come a little bit more to the salinity tolerance here you see a series going from no salt to 300 millimoders of NaCl which is 30 ds per meter so that's way above 50 percent sea water most crops would already die at this 10 ds per meter so what we see here is a sequence of one variety this is zero this is 100 millimoders of salt and then we go to 200 and 300 so we see growth is less at 300 millimoders but we still see that the plant is not looking bad it's really healthy it doesn't show any yellowing it even has a head and we see that the 10 ds per meter the plants and this is one variety that's another they really look almost the same still and the yield levels are also similar so that is why I think there's an enormous potential for using this crop in salinity affected areas here you see calculated grain yields from from a trial and there is a wide difference between varieties in the level there's one good variety here reabamba that already there's almost a three tons per hectare here you see there is a decline when you go to 100 millimoders in yield but it's a very acceptable decline it's still above two tons per hectare with a good variety if you would compare that with barley which is also quite salt tolerant then you see barley drops much relatively much more than quinoa you can also see that here where we have put it as a sort of stress index that's the relative grain yield where we put everything at zero at 100 and you see all the varieties here have a decline but we still have 70 80 percent of the yield at 100 millimolar NaCl which is 10 ds per meter and barley there is also not bad it still has 45 percent of the production with no salt but it drops much faster and this is really not as good in tolerating salt saline conditions scheme water use is also different and that's also showing a little bit how much water you need to get it going here you see that crop without any salinity needs about 300 350 millimetres of water or you has an evapotranspiration of about 300 millimetres of water to get this two and a half tons per hectare and you see that if you go to 100 millimolar the yield drops a little bit but also the water use drops if you go to very high salinity levels of course because production levels are lower you also see lower evapotranspiration here you see the soil evaporation so then at the 300 millimolars you can see that crop evapotranspiration is not much higher than soil evaporation only and also growth rates are very reduced at those very very high salinity levels I would also then recommend that this crop would be used in areas where the salinity is initial salinity in the soil might be high so like five to ten ds ds per meter but we still need a little bit of rainfall because otherwise because of this evaporation evapotranspiration of the crop the water would be lost from the soil and the ec of the soil the salinity level would only increase so you need replenishment of the crop water use and that is if you would do that with parsley or with saline water then you would get an accumulation of salt so we have a need of some rainfall in the area where the soil is saline I think but that's for discussion maybe now going to the Mekong Delta this is this I borrowed from Dr Bika she showed that maybe the earlier talk but it's good to have to repeat that here you see a season one year and you see that we have let's first look at the salinity level here that's this curve here you see that it goes from very low and that is this phase when rainfall starts you see that salinity level drops to very low values and that is the cropping season where rise is still possible but then when rainfall stops and water loss from the soil to soil evaporation and also when you would have a crop crop evaporation would decrease the amount of soil water then you see that the salinity level really goes up to six and later even above eight gram per liter which is about 10 ds per meter so this is actually the range of salinity levels where quinoa doesn't suffer yet and then this could be the end of the growing season for quinoa so in this phase you could grow quinoa and then it would be one of the best crops to grow in that season and this season here you might grow rice still so in this two cropping system it would be the idea that in the drier season quinoa could replace other crops that now are becoming increasingly difficult to grow in these saline conditions so associated with the rainfall pattern you see this pattern in salinity and that makes it difficult to grow crops in this season and quinoa would would have no problems at all with this kind of salinity level so we're now testing this also with Dr Bika and Travyn University in January we will start sowing and planting quinoa in in the Mekong Delta Travyn province to really sort of demonstrate that this is feasible in this area you can see the area I think if I'm this should be the Travyn area I believe and you see that if you look at today and 2050 the salinity will get further into the land so the problems are aggravating and these are areas where rice production becomes increasingly problematic which is shown here so we are looking at this area here in the Travyn area somewhere here and you see here that there are areas where rice yield loss is between 80 and 100 percent or 30 and 80 percent the orange so that's a tremendous decrease in rice productivity and the challenges and the opportunity also to find other crops and I think that we should really try quinoa in these areas where rice production becomes almost infeasible now to show this in another way you see a range of crops from quinoa to rice and of course mace, soybean and rice have an advantage in the existing market because these products are known but under salinity saline conditions they're really not going to do really well and you see that we have other possibilities like cowpea or mustard greens that could also have some salt tolerance but quinoa really is the most strong crop in terms of salt tolerance the negative is that we have to look at how we get adoption of this crop there is a global market for it but that has a certain level of demand I think it would be interesting to look at how the diet of people that have a lot of rice in the diet can also be improved by replacing some rice with quinoa and that I think would be the challenge for the future to see how we can get quinoa production at the price level at maybe this level of three tons per hectare in say salinity affected areas where cost price of quinoa would become in the range of current price prices even they may be a little bit higher because the value the nutritional value is higher but it needs then of course we need to see how consumers can adopt this this product and put in their recipes and menu and that is a challenge on its own I think there has been some testing of quinoa in Asia and here you see a lot of trials in different countries and here you see grain yields even up to 10 tons per hectare in a location in China I have never seen that myself but it you see also that the other places are usually between some will be low to up to four five tons per hectare there's a Dutch variety even here NL6 which also performs at about above four tons per hectare in Vietnam in the we have seen that one variety of us atlas and this variety that's here two ones produced between two and two and a half three tons per hectare in different areas in Vietnam that is still under no salinity conditions but we also know that our varieties until 10 ds per meter don't suffer very much in yield so we can expect this type of level also under the rather high salinity levels of 5 to 10 ds per meter in the Mekong Delta as I said we are testing varieties in Vietnam atlas and two ones are good varieties that have been tested in several years several locations and always come out as best and one of the advantages of the Dutch variety that we have made is that it's non-bitter Kinoa has saponence in the outer layer of the seed and most varieties have this and this bitterness requires that you have to remove the outer layer of the seed with a sort of purling method and this debittering is technically totally feasible it costs about 20 percent of the yield so that's a waste and you need investments in the de saponification machine so we think that using non-bitter varieties that can be directly used would be easier to introduce and easier to adopt and we know that's a single gene only that causes the non-bitter trait and we have also found which gene that is here you see something coming out of the nature publication that we made on the genome of Kinoa Kinoa has two sort of ancestral diploid parents one is shown here this is the descendant of that parent and that is still alive today and this is another one and what we see is that sorry here this is one and that's the other here we see all the chromosomes of Kinoa and we can assess which of the 18 chromosomes are in the A genome and which are in the B genome here and we also see that we can link the A and B genomes to one another so the B6 links to the A14 so we can clearly see it's an L at that diploid we know the full sequence here you can see it also relates very much to B this is the B genome here with chromosomes one to nine here and the chromosomes of Kinoa align also in gene order almost fully with the B genome that creates huge opportunities for speeding up breeding in this crop too we also found the location here with a sort of analyzing segregating populations we found that there's a position where the non-bitter gene allele has 100 frequency so this is how we found the location of our non-bitter trait and we've also found which gene that this is a transcription factor that starts up the whole tritopine pathway in the outer layer of the seeds if it's non-functional there will be no tritopines and so no and that is no saponins a saponin is a tritopine so we get no saponins at all there no bitterness and no need for this further processing so no we can grow food in saline areas with Kinoa then we are starting up agronomy feasibility studies in the Mekong Delta with Traven University we expect that we get yields of two to three tons per hectare at areas where we have five to ten ds per meter and I think that will be a higher yield than with any other crop in such areas and therefore I think that Kinoa can improve food security and income in saline areas it could otherwise be that we have to order people have to abandon such areas and move further inland and then we would be wasting agricultural land that might be productive in terms of food production lots of things need to happen still we have to show the actual yield levels there we have to further improve yield and one of the options there is to start testing our commercial F1 hybrid seed varieties which have doubled the yield of atlas so that could be an enormous improvement also and I think we haven't seen the end of that yet we have to create fully day-length adapted varieties also for this area we have to check which varieties are best adapted and so that's in the field of plant breeding but we also have to develop the value chain we have to see whether local consumption is possible cost-effectively and we have to see whether maybe there might be a market for sales to the bigger cities in vietnam where today already you know it's sold at quite high prices but that could always be a niche market maybe we can look at whether export to world markets is possible but I think that also a very important aspect could be local consumption improving the diet and improving food security from land that otherwise would not produce food so these are my conclusions also so great potential it's until now quite yeah it's mostly driven by universities research institutes and also this small startup breeding company Radical Crops and I think that we have to see how we can scale up and help is needed I think to get to the next phase of the final validation and implementation in saline areas the work we do with Travyn University in the Mekong Delta is part of that but it might even be bigger than the Mekong Delta and with that I thank you for your attention thank you very much very much for this elaborate presentation and with a lot of detail I hear one echo and how do we prevent that maybe by switching off I can switch off my microphone at the moment and wait until people start asking questions and then turn it on again that's okay thank you so much for that let me first ask Robert you said that Dr. Bika would also wish to say something now your microphone is off of course I don't know what the Dr. Bika wants to say something Bika gave a presentation earlier and if Dr. Bika is in the audience of course I would give her the opportunity to say something okay so we can ask Dr. Bika is here let her please come in okay even if she comes if she would like to come in later that's also fine thank you very much I would like to open the floor for questions who can I give the floor I didn't see hands yet I didn't see questions in the chat yet I see a hand of Mariana Mariana please come in okay your your microphone Mariana does it change is it different yes this is much better okay and so one question about the crop residues that are left on the field so as we are interested in farming systems and not only in one crop so how does it fit into a mixed farming system how does it fit into a circular system so what is known about quality and quantity of crop residues after harvest and then I would have also some practical questions about the experiment are you then using brackish water for irrigation on station and are you also using brackish water on farm so that that would be perhaps a bit challenging but this is I'm really interested now also thanks I understand the questions so let's first talk about the residues um the residues even offer an opportunity to remove salt from the system and we have to see whether that is an interesting opportunity but the the salinity let's say the the the ash level the mineral level in the residue can be extremely high because the plant can tolerate sodium and chloride in the plant we have even found values up to one molar mole per per liter in the in the in the fresh plant that's extremely high so you could have something like 50 to 200 kilos of salt in the residual biomass and you could then remove that from the system and I think that could be very valuable of course you want organic matter in the soil but that's another aspect so that has to be balanced I think um in the grain you will not remove a lot of salt happily because otherwise it would be inedible I think uh or not healthy so we've seen that it doesn't accumulate in the grain but it accumulates in the residue in terms of crop rotation I think that other crops grown uh I'm not so related botanically that you might expect the same sort of diseases to happen so I think in that respect crop rotation should not be an issue that was your first question I think the second question was related to how we supply water one of the things is that we get rainfall in December still so we can do a lot of production already on the amount of water that's in the soil and we have to see how much water that proves to be and then we could consider also see whether there's a benefit to using canal water that is maybe at the level of three to four gram per liter I think that that would be values that you could see in canal water in this area for quinoa that would not be a problem to apply that but of course then we have to look at the system to see whether adding that kind of salt to the soil is is really uh uh wanted and whether maybe the rainfall that follows after the quinoa season might even be sufficient to leach out some of the salt because what you see is here that salt levels are going down also later again so there might be opportunities for using brackish water for irrigation and we were thinking about using land that has some salinity level but we're still finalizing the setups of the experiments so we can certainly include a treatment factor where we have no irrigation with canal water and we have irrigation with saline canal water I think that that would be a possibility. Thank you very much Robert for answering this question meanwhile Mariana already got a new question for you already in the chat but I'll keep that pending a bit and first move to Ola who had his hand up before that Ola please come in with your question. Thank you yes I have actually two questions I think but to what's the same topic and that is probably the biggest barrier and that's the market and so my question is what what is the current is is there any current production of quinoa in Vietnam and is there any market how is it sold currently if if ever you showed I think a graph with different aspects and one was the market that was shown in red so quinoa that was red yeah yeah but okay because your question there is import of quinoa from other producing countries in quinoa so in Hanoi you can find it in the supermarket it's sold at something like eight euro per 500 grams yeah so that is really for probably sort of expat market or very rich people but it's being sold you see the white one you see the three color one and whatever so we found that in Hanoi also and Ho Chi Minh city that will be the same and so there is some consumption but also we know that if it would be a good food and it can be used easily in replacing some elements in menus then adoption can does not have to be a bottleneck I got this question also when we had the securing water food grant to start up this quinoa piloting in Vietnam they asked do you have examples of new crops being accepted and there are examples and soybean in Africa is one I think and what I read then is what that in the 1970s it was tried and it totally failed because it was only focusing at ergonomic feasibility but indeed the market and the consumer adoption was forgotten about but there were two countries where it was successful and it proved that they were providing recipes to consumers and they had products that where soybean was used in sources where otherwise some other bean was used and there soybean was taken up because it was a good productivity and a better better cost price than other other legumes in the system so then in the 1980s I believe that it was restarted and then also taking into account consumer adoption and providing recipes where traditional products could be replaced by soybean and then it became a big success and I think soybean is a big success today in Africa so I think that we need indeed something where we show how you could use quinoa in dishes that and it can really easily replace rice in a dish because it is not exactly the same texture but it really performs in the same way in a dish you could say and then providing better protein. That's exactly my second question that I wanted to ask because I know that quinoa is available in Vietnam I bought it regularly I think it's rather towards four to five euros per 500 grams but you know we did this test with this nothing course where people were sent to supermarkets and they found these things and then this price came up I was also a little bit surprised about this super high price because it should really be easy to get cheaper yeah I agree. So my question actually is you say it can easily replace rice and I used it exactly in that way to replace rice and that purely for health reasons and even I have had to say that yes you can do it but it's not the same food experience it's not the same it's not the same food experience I'm not someone who is like a particular rice lover so I'm wondering how people who are used to eating more rice and love rice much more than me how that would translate into really defining that it's easily can easily replace. I can give an example we had this course and we had all these people from Vietnam in the course and we did the cooking test and we made several different things and what was like best was just the plain rice that the plain quinoa cooked without any addition of salt or flavors or whatever and that was very much liked and now of course rice in Asia is often a little bit sticky so it's a little bit more easy to eat with chopsticks and eating quinoa with chopsticks is a little bit of a challenge if you wouldn't put the sauce through it or so but we know also that quinoa comes in more sticky variants even so there is even in Canada there were varieties that were used in salads for example as cooked cold and that didn't work well because that quinoa was too sticky and the varieties we have produced for Europe don't have that stickiness it has to do with amylose amylopectina ratios it's a very easy thing like every time and it could easily also be seen whether we should make more sticky quinoa that would even look more like a rice type but this is exactly something that should be taken into account also right quinoa as an ingredient maybe where you do a little bit of milling and so we need to do something it's not equivalent to rice but I think you can replace some rice in the diet I also made example fully vegetarian quinoa burgers that kind of stuff and it's really really very tasty and so you have to do something here in providing the way to use it in your diet I think I think Robert we got a very good ambassador for quinoa here having this explanation however it also shows that for a crop to be a success we also need the link to other researchers for instance the researchers who do research on consumer behavior and on why farmers change from one crop to the other so I can imagine that you would really wish to link to other researchers possibly on this call who are doing that kind of research so that with all the breeding work you do on quinoa they can do work on how to explore with consumers how it fits in their consumption pattern and also how it fits in the farming patterns and that is in a way linking also to the question that Mariana put about the palatability of the residue for livestock and whether there is literature available on that are you aware of any literature available on that uh yes we we have tested quinoa as a silage quinoa in the past a little bit like it's done with maize a little bit differently than just getting mature grain and then have a residue we used the whole crop it was a whole crop silage of quinoa and it proved to be very palatable by by dairy and we know a little bit the equivalent of a kilo of quinoa silage compared to grass highlights for example so and so it is possible well we have to look into how easily it would be to have a mature grain crop and then use the more lignified stems in in cattle feeding I think depending on the productivity level of these these uh of this of cattle uh it might be possible to play a role if you look at animals for traction I think that the straw would be palatable for animals if you would want to have yeah from your answer I'm getting that it might be an interesting option for future research where you do research on the quinoa that it might be interesting to at the same time search the research on the palatability for the residue for the livestock yeah I'm going to we also have to take into account that if you do it on saline land uh that that it might be too saline uh stuff for animals so we have to be careful of course no of course but that's exactly that's exactly the importance of such research where the livestock people should be involved because if we think that the the the rice straw and that in in many cases rice straw is used as fodder so if a farmer would replace it it might be that there it's important that it could be a fodder crop and then if the quinoa is so useful because it can grow under saline conditions but if the residue if the salinity accumulates in the residue then we need to also do the research on that okay I go back to Ola for the question he has a question yes thanks and that's regarding the salinity tolerance um so you showed that at I think high salinity concentrations the plant would not die necessarily but stop growing and if then my question is if after that high salinity if you apply fresh water again will it start growing again and produce seeds that would it still produces seed at this high salinity level so uh whether it it starts producing a big plant and a big head again after uh getting fresh water will depend on the stage at which you apply it because if it would still be uh let's say budding stage yeah and then you would have a rainfall and a reduction or whatever irrigation and reduction of the salinity then it would still have some sort of recovery potential but if it's already flowering and grain filling yeah then the whole architecture is set in stone I think the the most important thing is if you start with a low salinity level and it would build up during the season then you might just be in time and then you would might have this high salinity in the final physical maturation stage for example where or the final stage of grain filling which can still then be finished so you will still have the product while otherwise maybe uh if it happens during grain filling the plant would just wilt and have no yield at all this plant will not wilt under these conditions so it can finish its its production cycle fully yeah thank you very much for that I think I think the 10 dsp meter is already extremely high I don't know what you think about that so at that level it still grows almost to the same architecture so sorry for interrupting you Robert but uh I I think that uh you with your level of knowledge you could at least kind of tell us for another one more hour about Kinoa however I need to kind of finish off almost because we said we will keep you for one hour as an audience and I do like to stick to that I want to point out the important remarks that Mariana made in the chat uh that maybe we should not consider Kinoa as a replacer for rice but explore how it could be used for new products and then it could be the other um other dishes could come out of that and then that still could catch the liking of the consumer and also uh we need to think about the importance of Kinoa as a dry season crop uh in relation to water use also that we do not um kind of go for more ground water use in those situations where groundwater use is already overstressed um one point that was not covered yet was about the where Kinoa is studied in the CGI system uh Ola can you uh in a very brief two second answer where it is I don't think it's particularly part of any CG Institute there may be some research in the more in the non focused institutes like IITA but I think it's really one of those under researched crops generally so we found an orphan crop and maybe Erie in his work on the one CGIR can adopt this orphan because it's so close to rise but let's see what happens with that so that also makes that it's urgent to see how we anchor the research in at the world scale because of course we are very happy and proud of the research that's done from Wageningen with other partners all over the world however it's important to link that also to other research being done everywhere so if there are questions from the CGIR site on this point please let us know let Robert know or if you let us know we will guide you to Robert and then we can see how we can anchor this better having said that I like to come at the end of this session thank you very much to Robert but also the other people in his team Dr Bica and also the others we found it all very interesting I also like to thank the team from Asia Mega deltas who always does the kind of background work putting the announcement ready getting the broadcasting organized very much appreciated not only this year but we also look forward to the next year we haven't set a date yet but I think following the line of the third Wednesday it will be 17th of January and looking at all I think that we will sit sometime soon maybe around 8 January or so for setting what could be the topic for 17 I leave it to you to select one from Wageningen site we also like to table for instance the livestock topic but also the food safety topic we have other researchers working on those and we like in this new year we are very happy to continue the delta talks over the year ends break but please all enjoy your year ends and looking forward to see you again next year Ola would you like to close off you you mentioned everything we're also from the Asian mega deltas side we're looking very much forward to continuing these webinar series I'm sure we'll find plenty of interesting topics also for next year we can coordinate on that early January and then second half of January we'll have the next version of the delta talks happy holidays also from my side bye and thank you all for being my audience and looking at that listening to my talk but also thank you very much for all these stimulating questions and suggestions for further work