Diagnostic Appraisal of the Sorghum Farming System and Breeding Priorities in Sierra Leone
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear Authors,
The article was prepared based on a survey. 210 farmers from 4 different regions from Sierra Leone were interviewed. Results let to describe the situation of farmers and sorghum production.
General concept comments:
The manuscript is relevant for the field, well-written and easy to read.
The last paragraph of Introduction describing study’s objective should be improved.
In Introduction one sentence about nutritious value of sorghum could be added to describe why is it important food product.
In the section Materials and methods please add a subsection Statistics
Results section comments:
All tables should be written in the same style.
In Table 2. Please remove numbers 1. and 2. Before Hire land and Lending
In table 4. Harvest is described in bags. Please write next to it how many kilograms are in a bag
Please change name of the caption Picture 2. To Figure 2.
Unter the table 6 there is a description of letters:
L = weak/ low/ small?
H = good (or very good?)/ high
Please describe the meaning of * next to chi2 results
In subsection 4.8 please change the beginning of the sentence “According to 37…” to “According to Wadsworth et al. [37]…”
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We have looked through your comments and carefully tried to address them. Find them in track changes in the document.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
A. The materials and methods section needs more descriptions:
- Please explain the cluster sampling process. Only 210 farmers present in 52 villages? So in each village, only 4 farmers engaged in sorghum production? How about the distribution of respondents in the four region? Were the numbers of respondents equally distributed? Table 1 should also report the number (or percentage) of respondents in each region.
- How was the focus group participants identified? How and where was the focus group discussion implemented? What were the issues discussed? And then the results section should include and the findings of the focus group discussions. The same issues for the field observations.
- On the other hand, if the results of the research want to focus on only the findings from the structured questionnaire (or semi-structured?) The section on data collection needs revision. In the first two sentences, the study described the questionnaire is structure and semi-structured. It is unclear why two methods were used?
B. With regard to references and other editorial issues:
1. Check the references: #17, #18 is Leone, C. S. and Leone, S. S. truly the author name? Also for the entry of "SPSS, I" and others.
2. The first two paragraph of the introduction should be improved. There were replaced yet conflicting statement about the background status of the grain crop production in the study area.
3. The paper deducted that "One of the reasons for the lack of adoption of sorghum from other member countries is the lack of Sierra Leone farmers’ preferred traits and poor seed delivery mechanism. " But I think the lack of economic incentives for farmers to be more engaging the even develop the landrace of the crop which is reflected in up taking the sorghum for only part of the crop cycle, and not much of exiting markets for sorghum.
4. Lack of results and discussions on the field observation and group discussions.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Please find attached a point by point response to comments made.
With kind regards
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
