TARI Ilonga has the mandate to conduct and coordinate crops research on:
- Cereals: low and medium altitude maize, sorghum and millets
- Grain legumes: cowpea, green gram, pigeon pea, soya bean, chickpea, and bambara nuts
- Oilseed crops: sunflower
- Post-harvest technologies
The crop research covers crop improvement/breeding, agronomy, crop protection (entomology and pathology) and soil science while post-harvest deals with crop handling after harvesting, appropriate storage, processing and utilization. There is also the socio-economic section which deals with crop value chains