Exploring Niches of Medium-Season Grain Sorghums in Dryland Areas of Nigeria - Coping Strategies with Impacts of Climate Variability

Climate variability constitutes a major risk to agricultural production in West Africa drylands posing challenges to the livelihood of smallholder farmers. Sorghum crop, which displays a great diversity in growth, development and resource use efficiency has the potential to improve productivity of resilient farming system. However, to better understand plant growth and development in response to the environment there is need for applicable models for Agricultural Production Systems sIMulator (APSIM) framework (Keating et al., 2003; Holzworth et al., 2014). The application of well-calibrated crop growth models, could help to estimate their production potential in different sites and soil conditions, as well as the impact of different management interventions (Akinseye et al.,2017). This would further allow us to better assess the interaction of phenology with patterns of water use and WUE, a great interest to develop crop adaptation strategies in terms of combating climate variability