Chicken wings cooked with honey and soy (photo on Flickr by TheDeliciousLife).

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim became a champion and (sort of) celebrity spokesperson for agricultural-research-for-development this week to the delight of those of us in that (not so celebrity) world. The added bonus for the 700 or so staff of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), which is based in Africa and works throughout the developing world for better lives through livestock, is that his lede featured chicken wings and chicken feed.

Kim’s opening improbably also featured that unacknowledged greatest of all American holidays, ‘Super Bowl Sunday’, in which Americans of all tribes gather in homes and consume vast quantities of snack foods (Wikipedia trivial pursuit of the day: This is the second-largest day of food consumption in the United States after Thanksgiving) while watching the final game in the National Football League playoffs.

‘One bit of bad news for millions of Americans during the Super Bowl’, the World Bank president begins in an opinion piece published in America’s popular news aggregator and blogger website, the Huffington Post, ‘was that chicken wings were suddenly more expensive.’

From this modest, if unexpectedly diverting, opening, Kim deftly if abruptly segues into the causes and implications of this national (not quite) disaster: drought, climate change, global hunger, declining agricultural productivity.

‘The cause, in part, was the U.S. drought last summer. The drought was the most widespread in more than 50 years, and it drove up the cost of chicken feed. . . .

‘The bad news for the 850 million undernourished people around the world is that erratic weather is affecting food production globally. High and volatile food prices have become the new normal, and more and more extreme weather events are partly to blame. . . .

Fast food restaurant in Maputo, Mozambique’s fast-growing capital city where food riots have occurred in recent years due to rising prices of staple foods (photo credit: ILRI/Mann).

‘Looking ahead, feeding the world will get harder with each passing year. We need to produce 70 percent more food by 2050 to feed the 9 billion people who will be living on the planet by then.

‘Climate change is making that challenge more difficult.

‘It is no secret that agriculture is a major part of the climate problem — it generates 32 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions. But, by changing the way we grow our food, it can become part of the solution.

Done right, we can increase agricultural productivity, make farmers better able to ride out droughts or floods, and pull greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere into the soil. Agriculture can be climate smart and if we get it right, it can be a triple win.

‘So what will it take?’ Kim asks rhetorically? ‘A combination of age-old methods like better mulching and crop rotation, together with improved water and livestock management, more accurate weather forecasting and crop insurance, and new crops like scuba rice that survive longer under water, and drought-tolerant maize that thrives despite erratic rainfall.

It means ramping up agricultural research through groups like CGIAR, the Global Agricultural Research Partnership, so they can focus on climate-proofing food crops and make agriculture a carbon sink. . . .

A girl shares the entrance to her house with a family of chickens in Oyo State, Nigeria (photo credit: ILRI/Stevie Mann).

‘For many Americans’, the World Bank chief concludes, ‘the higher price of chicken wings was bad news. But the good news that could emerge from food-price sticker shock is that more people will ask what we can do in agriculture to help stop climate change while still feeding the world.’

Read the whole article on the Huffington Post: What can we learn from expensive chicken wings on Super Bowl Sunday?, 5 Feb 2013.

Filed under: Agriculture, Animal Feeding, Animal Production, Food security, ILRI, Opinion piece, PA, Research, USA Tagged: CGIAR, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim

Researchers testing tools with farmers

Feed is often cited as the first limiting constraint to livestock intensification in smallholder mixed-crop farming systems in developing countries.

However attempts to deal with the feed constraint tend to focus on promotion of a fairly standard set of feed technologies with often disappointing results. Our experience is that feed intervention failures can be traced to three main issues:

• Failure to place feed in broader livelihood context;
• Lack of farmer design and ownership;
• Neglect of how interventions fit the context: land, labour, cash, knowledge etc.

To address these three key issues, in 2012,ILRI and some of its international and national partners tested and refined emerging tools for feed resource and demand assessment, value chain analysis, rapid market appraisal and feed technology prioritization. The idea is that these will be taken up and used in CGIAR Research Programs – notably Livestock and Fish, Dryland Systems, and Humidtropics.

In this posting, ILRI scientist Alan Duncan looks back on the work of two projects – Ethiopia Livestock Feeds (ELF, funded by ACIAR) and the Africa RISING ‘quickfeed‘ early win project (funded by USAID) to give a brief account of what we learned through testing and developing these tools.

FEAST – a Feed Assessment Tool

FEAST was already reasonably well developed at the outset of the project having been tried in a number of contexts. Our ELF and Quickfeeds project experiences confirmed that the tool is relatively useful in its current form. One of the key strengths of FEAST is that it encourages technical researchers to talk to farmers. Comments from our national research partners suggested that they had found this to be a useful discipline as opportunities to engage directly with farmers are scarce but provide very useful new perspectives. But we need a lot more direct farmer engagement if the technologies developed in research centres are to be useful and appropriate to farmers’ needs.

For FEAST, as with the other tools, our emerging view is that the process of applying the tool is as important as the outputs of the exercise themselves. The simple discipline of asking the right questions to farmers about feed in a broader context proved enlightening to those involved. The other positive feedback we received from partners was about the readymade outputs. Having a simple readymade Excel template to input the data and produce charts and tables proved to be popular. This allowed the rapid generation of informative reports based on real (if approximate) data. In terms of reporting, having clear guidance and a ‘template’ about what kind of data to include along with some readymade charts was a real plus.

The FEAST tool is online and was downloaded 150 times by people in 30 countries in 2012

Techfit – a feed prioritization tool

Development of Techfit is at a much earlier stage.  We did make some progress in developing aspects of the tool. One key area of progress was the development of a simple checklist to guide users to scores for the five context attributes. This was then applied and modified in the field.

The core excel sheet in Techfit is relatively simple but we realised through testing the tool that the core sheet requires some substantial modification in two main respects:

• The list of generic technologies requires some thought. It is useful to have an inventory of possible technologies but it is difficult to know how specific to make them. Some technologies are really only applicable in particular locations (e.g. feeding leaves of Enset would only really be applicable in Ethiopia). The technology descriptions need to be sufficiently specific to make any suggested priorities emerging from use of the tool useful but sufficiently generic to make the tool applicable in different contexts.

• The scores we developed for each of the five technology attributes need further thought. Some of the short-listed technologies arising from application of the tool were clearly unhelpful. The scores need to be revised by a group of experts who really understand what each technology involves.

The other aspect that needs further work is the development of a simple cost-benefit assessment method to work out whether particular technologies make financial sense. One difficulty is the fact that many technologies only contribute part of the diet, and attributing improved performance to the technology can prove challenging. Our national partners did make some attempt at a cost-benefit assessment but this aspect requires much more effort.

With all this in mind, we plan a further expert workshop in early 2013 with the following objectives:

• Develop the list of technologies to be sufficiently generic to apply to a range of contexts but to be sufficiently specific to generate useful suggestions
• Refine technology scores to be more realistic and justify each score with a few words of explanation.
• Develop a methodology for cost-benefit analysis of individual technologies.

Value chain assessment

Our aim in the projects was to develop a value chain assessment tool that was sufficiently light and practicable to be applied by non-specialists. We engaged a value chain expert as consultant and he offered orientation on the methodology to national researchers during our training event. We had to considerably adjust the expectations of the value chain expert since what he proposed was relatively cumbersome and beyond the capacity of the project to support. We worked with the consultant to simplify the checklists partly based on insights from similar checklists developed by the Improving Productivity and Market Success (IPMS) project of ILRI.

The emphasis was very much on identifying problems as perceived by market chain actors rather than collecting detailed and quantitative data. The checklists were certainly not perfect when we proceeded to implementation. The implementation itself also left some gaps. For example, one key element that was missing was information on volume of product passing through different market channels to give an idea of the importance of different market channels. However, the VCA did provide a reasonable overview of the value chains that we studied and raised some key issues. For example, for the sheep VCA the study showed the very different requirements of the domestic and export markets in terms of size and condition of animals.

As with the application of FEAST and Techfit, the process of applying the tool was very valuable for researchers. For some of the technical researchers it was their first experience of thinking beyond technology issues. The development of simple VCA checklists has been useful in the context of the Livestock and Fish program and the same consultant has been engaged to help with assessment of small ruminant value chains in in Ethiopia. The experiences in ELF and Quickfeeds provide a strong foundation for this ongoing work.

Institutional context

In addition to the technical points summarized above, the field testing and refining of the three tools led to important results regarding how the tools could better catalyze the development process. The key result was that applying the VCA, FEAST and Techfit tools within the value-chain approach engages simultaneously researchers, extension/development agents, value chain agents and livestock/feed producers in knowledge exchange cycles. This engagement, facilitated by the application of the tools, ensured the sharing of ideas, reservations and insights within and amongst the R4D community and its various primary and secondary clients which, in turn, led to identifying and prioritizing potential interventions, whether technical, institutional or policy-related,

The subsequent challenge is how to develop for each specific local context ways of institutionalizing the application of the tools and their continuous refinement. And, within that process, how best to turn the proposed interventions emerging from application of the tools into tangible activities on the ground for the benefit of resource-poor livestock keepers and their value-chain partners.

Find out more!

FEAST

• See examples of FEAST reports – http://mahider.ilri.org/handle/10568/16490

Techfit

Ethiopia Livestock Feeds project

• Download reports – http://mahider.ilri.org/handle/10568/16373

Africa RISING ‘quickfeed’ win project

• Download reports – http://cgspace.cgiar.org/handle/10568/16837

Alan Duncan’s presentation on livestock feeds in the CGIAR research programs

Alan Duncan’s presentation on feast and techfit

Filed under: Agriculture, Animal Feeding, CRP11, CRP12, CRP37, East Africa, Ethiopia, Feeds, Fodder, Forages, PLE, Project, Value Chains Tagged: ACIAR, ELF, USAID

An East African researcher holds handfuls of sweet potato roots and leaves, to be used as animal feed (photo credit: Neil Palmer/CIAT).

‘Pressures from climate change and population growth are increasing the competition for grains as food or livestock feed in countries like Kenya, Tanzania, and Rwanda. But sweet potato, which can grow in harsh climatic conditions with minimal inputs, can provide a healthy and easily accessible solution.

Researchers from the International Livestock Research Institute, International Potato Center, and multi-partner East Africa Dairy Development project are teaming up with other public and private partners to experiment with different sweet potato varieties and feed formulations that can expand options for livestock producers.’

‘Though sweet potato has been used successfully in livestock systems in Asia, it still raises eyebrows in Africa.

“In China, 25 to 30 percent of sweet potato crops are used for animal feed,” says Ben Lukuyu, a livestock specialist who spearheads the project for the International Livestock Research Institute. But he laughs as he describes the response he typically receives from colleagues in Africa: “You’re a livestock specialist. What are you doing working with sweet potato?”

ILRI livestock feed scientist Ben Lukuyu (photo credit: ILRI).

‘East Africa has the highest per capita consumption of livestock products (e.g., dairy cattle, pig, and goats for meat and milk) in Sub-Saharan Africa. But major feed shortages occur during the dry season, and quality feed concentrates demand a price many cannot afford. Napier grass, which is used in Kenya as a primary feed for dairy farming, requires significant allocations of land and is suffering from a major disease outbreak.

‘In comparison, sweet potato vines offer more protein and dry matter per unit area and require less land than other commonly used livestock feeds. For example, Kenyan researchers have found that 4 kilos of vines could replace 1 kilo of dairy concentrate feed. Sweet potato roots also make good feed. And both the roots and vines are a healthy source of food for people, too. . . .

The program sometimes draws the nickname “cow cafeteria” or “pig pantry”. Lukuyu explains the program’s purpose: “We want to give farmers options for mixing feed and feeding strategies to best respond to their needs and demands.” . . .

‘By putting sweet potato on their families’ tables and now even in their animal’s troughs, African farmers are able to have more climate-smart and affordable options for keeping everyone healthy and fed.’

Read the whole article at AlertNet: Putting sweet potato in the trough, 18 Oct 2012.

If you’re interested in making sweet potato silage yourself, consult this colourful and comprehensive brochure: Making High-quality Sweet Potato Silage compiled by Ben Lukuyu (ILRI), Charles K Gachuiri (University of Nairobi), Sammy Agili (International Potato Center), Carlos Leon-Velarde (International Potato Center) and Josephine Kirui (World Agroforestry Centre), 2012.

Filed under: Animal Feeding, China, Indonesia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Vietnam Tagged: AlertNet, Ben Lukuyu, CIP, EADD, ICRAF, Sweet potato silage

Cassava, potato and sweet potato  trials at high altitude in Rwanda (photo credit: ILRI/Albert Mwangi).

‘Pressures from climate change and population growth are increasing the competition for grains as food or livestock feed in countries like Kenya, Tanzania, and Rwanda. But sweet potato, which can grow in harsh climatic conditions with minimal inputs, can provide a healthy and easily accessible solution.

‘Researchers from the International Livestock Research Institute, International Potato Center, and multi-partner East Africa Dairy Development project are teaming up with other public and private partners to experiment with different sweet potato varieties and feed formulations that can expand options for livestock producers.

‘Though sweet potato has been used successfully in livestock systems in Asia, it still raises eyebrows in Africa.

In China, 25 to 30 percent of sweet potato crops are used for animal feed,” says Ben Lukuyu, a livestock specialist who spearheads the project for the International Livestock Research Institute. But he laughs as he describes the response he typically receives from colleagues in Africa: “You’re a livestock specialist. What are you doing working with sweet potato?”

‘East Africa has the highest per capita consumption of livestock products (e.g., dairy cattle, pig, and goats for meat and milk) in Sub-Saharan Africa. But major feed shortages occur during the dry season, and quality feed concentrates demand a price many cannot afford. Napier grass, which is used in Kenya as a primary feed for dairy farming, requires significant allocations of land and is suffering from a major disease outbreak.

‘In comparison, sweet potato vines offer more protein and dry matter per unit area and require less land than other commonly used livestock feeds. For example, Kenyan researchers have found that 4 kilos of vines could replace 1 kilo of dairy concentrate feed. Sweet potato roots also make good feed. And both the roots and vines are a healthy source of food for people, too. . . .

‘By putting sweet potato on their families’ tables and now even in their animal’s troughs, African farmers are able to have more climate-smart and affordable options for keeping everyone healthy and fed.’

Read the whole article at AlertNet: Putting sweet potato in the trough, 18 Oct 2012.

Filed under: Animal Feeding, Crop residues, Dairying, East Africa, Goats, ILRI, Intensification, Kenya, MarketOpps, PA, Pigs, Project, Rwanda, Tanzania Tagged: AlertNet, Ben Lukuyu, CIP, EADD, Sweet potato silage

On  26 September 2012, animal nutritionist Michael Blümmel with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) presented an ‘livestock live talk’ on Using crop by-products to intensify and sustain food production at the ILRI campus in Nairobi.

View the presentation:

 

‘Livestock live talks’ is a seminar series at ILRI that aims to address livestock-related issues, mobilize external as well as in-house expertise and audiences and engage the livestock community around interdisciplinary conversations that ask hard questions and seek to refine current research concepts and practices.

All ILRI staff, partners and donors, and interested outsiders are invited. Those non-staff wanting to come, please contact Angeline Nekesa at a.nekesa[at]cgiar.org (or via ILRI switchboard 422-3000) to let her know. If you would like to give one of these seminars, or have someone you would like to recommend, please contact Silvia Silvestri at s.silvestri[at]cgiar.org (or via ILRI switchboard 422-3000).

Filed under: Animal Feeding, Asia, Crop residues, Crop-Livestock, Event, Feeds, Fodder, Research, South Asia Tagged: livestock live talks, Michael Blummel

 Rice residues in southeast Punjab, India, prior to the wheat season (photo on Flickr by Neil Palmer).

Why are most poor farmers in developing countries not adopting ‘no-till agriculture’ (also called ‘conservation agriculture’)—an eco-friendly, natural-resource-conserving technology that helps conserve soil fertility by eliminating ploughing and keeping the remains of crops on the ground after harvest? The simple and straightforward answer stares one in the face on small farms worldwide, that would be the face of a cow, goat, sheep or other hungry farm animal that consumes the stubble as an essential part of its seasonal feed resources.

Nicholas Magnan, in the OUPblog, has an interesting review of the value of ‘stubble’—also know as ’crop by-products’, aka crop wastes’, aka ‘crop residues’, aka ‘stover’. As scientists such as Michael Blümmel and Diego Valbuena at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and other organizations working in and for developing-country agriculture have been arguing for some time, the value of crop ‘wastes’—what remains of cereal and legume crops after their grains and pods have been harvested for human consumption—is invaluable for poor farmers raising farm animals as well as growing food crops.

‘No-till agriculture . . . offers many benefits to farmers and society. . . . [D]espite the benefits, small farmers in developing countries aren’t adopting no-till en masse. The potential explanations for the lack of no-till adoption are numerous. . . .

‘No-till requires farmers to keep stubble on the field after each harvest, so that it adds organic matter to the soil. But farmers in developing countries usually raise livestock in addition to cultivating crops, and stubble is an important source of livestock feed. The need to use the stubble for feed is particularly strong for small and isolated farmers without good alternatives. Farmers therefore face a tradeoff between leaving stubble in the field for no-till or feeding it to their livestock. The question then becomes, how steep is this tradeoff between the benefits of no-till agriculture and the cost of feeding one’s livestock?

‘Doug Larson, Ed Taylor, and I set out to quantify this tradeoff to see if small farmers are indeed stuck on stubble when it comes to no-till adoption in Morocco. In Morocco, Rachid Mrabet and others have shown no-till to perform as well as conventional methods when rainfall is good, and better than conventional methods when rainfall is poor (which occurs regularly in this drought-prone country). However, no-till adoption is scarce among small farmers, who almost always also raise sheep, goats, and cows. Employing unique livestock data gathered from the same farmers during a good rainfall year and a bad one, we found the economic value of stubble to farmers to be around one quarter of the total value of cereal production in a good year. In a drought year, when grain production was lower and livestock feed scarce, the value of crop stubble accounted for three quarters of the total value of cereal production.

In either case, the value of stubble as feed exceeded the upfront savings of no-till for most farmers.

‘. . . On a larger scale we also see evidence of the how differences in the availability of feed influences no-till adoption. Diego Valbuena and colleagues found that in multiple sites across Africa and South Asia demand for crop residues is higher where grazing land is poorer. And generally, no-till adoption is more common among small farmers in South America — where more plant matter is available as feed — than elsewhere. Understanding which farmers place the highest value on stubble as feed will help better target extension, and better design policies that improve access to alternative feed sources. . . .

‘Efforts to disseminate no-till and other technologies to small farmers in developing countries should therefore focus on identifying and alleviating the constraints that result in crop stubble being so valuable as feed to these farmers. Otherwise the cost of no-till adoption of no-till technology may simply be too high.

‘Nicholas Magnan recently joined the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Georgia, Athens. He was a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, DC studying various aspects of agricultural technology adoption. He is the co-author of “Stuck on Stubble? The Non-market Value of Agricultural Byproducts for Diversified Farmers in Morocco” in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, which is available to read for a limited time. It examines the value of agricultural byproducts, such as crop stubble, to crop-livestock farmers who produce both cereal and crop residue, where the latter can be used as livestock feed. To properly assess the cost of introducing new technologies into such systems, one must value the implicit cost of byproducts.’

Read the whole article by Nicholas Magnan on the Oxford University Press Blog (OUPblog): Are small farmers in developing countries stuck on stubble?, 7 Aug 2012.

Read a recent science article on this subject by ILRI scientists Diego Valbuena, Alan Duncan, Bruno Gérard, Mariana Rufino, Nils Teufel and colleagues from other institutes in the CGIAR Systemwide Livestock Programme: Conservation agriculture in mixed crop–livestock systems: Scoping crop residue trade-offs in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, published in Field Crops Research 132: 175–184, in June 2012.

Filed under: Animal Feeding, Article, Crop residues, Crop-Livestock, ILRI, PA, SLP, Soils Tagged: Alan Duncan, Bruno Gerard, Diego Valbuena, IFPRI, Mariana Rufino, Michael Blummel, Morocco, Nils Teufel, OUPblog, SLP

Women herding camels in Kenya (photo on Flickr by Curt Carnemark/World Bank Photo Collection).

Polly Ericksen, a senior scientist with the People, Livestock and Environment Theme at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), announced to the ILRI community last Friday new funding from the European Union that will finance a three-year food security project that ILRI will conduct in Kenya’s drylands with the SNV Netherlands Development Organisation and the Kenya Livestock Marketing Council.

SNV made the announcement on its website earlier this week, saying that these partners ‘have been awarded EU funding of €1.8 million under the Kenya Rural Development Program. The three-year project focuses on securing long-term food security through boosting agricultural productivity, enabling better responses to drought and improving livelihoods in arid and semi-arid lands.

‘Aiming to improve pastoral livelihoods through sustainable market systems, the project will promote pastoral livelihoods diversification . . . .

‘The project will enable improved access and availability of fodder for 25,000 livestock keepers households and empower 1,000 female-led households through a more profitable camel milk trade. In addition, 25 vibrant livestock markets in arid areas will benefit from improved management including information flow. . . .

‘SNV has overall responsible for the project and will specifically take the lead for commercialisation of fodder production, commercialisation of camel milk, of strengthening livestock markets. ILRI is in charge of the development and dissemination of knowledge on livestock markets and climate change resilience. The Kenya Livestock Marketing Council will support policy dialogue and livestock markets on the ground.’

Read the whole article on the SNV website: EU to fund €1.8 million project on innovative market-based livestock systems in Kenya, 22 Jun 2012.

Filed under: Animal Feeding, Climate Change, Drought, Drylands, East Africa, Food security, ILRI, Kenya, Markets, PA, Pastoralism, PLE, Project, Vulnerability, Women Tagged: Camel milk, EU, Kenya Livestock Marketing Council, Polly Ericksen, SNV

Vietnamese farmers with cattle fodder. A report by CIAT says livestock systems that use improved forage crops reduce the effects of climate change (photo credit: ILRI/Werner Stür).

Last week, AlertNet published an opinion piece highlighting recent research by the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) on how forage-based systems, which dominate agriculture in the tropics, could be harnessed to reduce livestock’s contribution to climate change.

‘Livestock have particularly been ‘lambasted for their voluminous greenhouse gas emissions, implicated in massive land degradation, and denounced for driving deforestation, [and] are supposedly the bad kids on the block – the black sheep of sustainable agriculture. The polarisation of the livestock debate has brought about one of the greatest public image travesties of our time. It has seen small-scale livestock keepers, who raise a handful of animals for milk or meat in low-tech systems with a negligible environmental footprint, tarred with the same brush as large-scale industrial producers.’

The article cites recently published research by CIAT, which shows that ‘well-managed “LivestockPlus” systems involving improved forage crops – plants grazed by livestock – actually have impressive environmental credentials.’

The findings are based research that looked at the use of a forage known as brachiaria, a deep-rooted grass native to Africa that is now widely grown in South America and in Southeast Asia; which shows that ‘improved forage crops’ have multiple benefits for sustainable smallholder agriculture and could be powerful crops for mitigating climate change as well as helping restore degraded pastures.

‘With its big green leaves, brachiaria has very high carbon accumulation potential, acting as a powerful carbon sink within livestock systems. It can also help retain and even increase stocks of soil carbon, in part by recycling carbon through animal manure and aboveground litter, and also due to its high turnover of roots – each generation of roots adds to the carbon stock deep in the soil.

‘In fact, the CIAT study shows that high quality forages like brachiaria are second only to native forest in terms of their potential for storing soil carbon. In areas with high rainfall, they could even sequester more atmospheric CO2 than forests. Forthcoming research will look more closely at this.

This latest research was published in CIAT’s new flagship publication Eco-Efficiency: From Vision to Reality, which details the science of sustainable smallholder agriculture.

‘Brachiaria has been shown to produce higher milk and meat yields in cattle – ten times more per unit land area than if the animals grazed on native savanna grass. And because it’s a high quality, easily digestible food, animals fed with brachiaria emit less methane per kilo of meat produced.’

‘With the right policy environment, higher productivity could also reduce the need for larger herds, in turn easing pressure on forests.’ The CIAT study recommends using brachiaria in “agro-silvo-pastoral systems”, or systems that incorporate an eco-efficient holy trinity of food crops, forages and trees.

According to article, ‘the solution [to the negative perception of livestock’s impact on the environment] could lie with the developing world’s 1 billion smallholder livestock keepers, who have much to gain from highly-productive LivestockPlus systems. Their involvement could be instrumental in helping to reversing livestock’s negative image, particularly if adoption of these systems means they become recognised as environmental guardians.’

Read the whole story on the AlertNet Blog: Climate Conversations: Livestock: Cure or curse?, 24 May 2012.

Filed under: Agriculture, Animal Feeding, Cattle, Climate Change, Forages, PA, Report, Southeast Asia Tagged: AlertNet, Brachiaria, CIAT

In the past few weeks, Madeline McCurry-Schmidt has published a series of short pieces exploring ways that animal scientists can help feed the world’s growing population.

Published on the American Society of Animal Science ‘Taking Stock’ blog, the five articles covered:

Part 1 – explored the coming food crisis from a livestock perspective
Part 2 – looked at how animal scientists use new nutrition research and technology to increase feed efficiency
Part 3 – looked at how new research and technology related to animal breeding can make animal production more efficient
Part 4 – looked at ways animal scientists can treat and prevent the diseases that threaten animal and human health
Part 5 – looked at the challenges of applying animal science research around the world.

All five parts can also be downloaded as a single PDF file

Filed under: Animal Breeding, Animal Diseases, Animal Feeding, Animal Health, Animal Production, Food security, Livestock, Research Tagged: ASAS

Min piglets at the experimental station at the Institute for Animal Science, in Beijing, China (photo credit: ILRI/Stevie Mann).

America is breeding farm animals for China, Reuters and the New York Times report, to supply China with more meat.

‘. . . In a country where pork is a staple, the demand for a protein-rich diet is growing faster than Chinese farmers can keep up. While Americans have cut back on meat consumption to the lowest level seen in two decades, Chinese consumers eat 10 percent more meat than they did five years ago.

‘China’s solution: to increase its supply by buying millions of live animals raised by American farmers as breeding stock, and capitalizing on decades of cutting-edge U.S. agricultural research.

‘By taking this step, breeders and exporters say, China will move from backyard farms to Western-style large, consolidated operations to keep up with demand. . . .

‘The focus on livestock genetics also represents an emerging economic bonanza for two of the most powerful American industries: technology and agriculture. Worldwide, the United States exported a record $664 million worth of breeding stock and genetic material like semen in 2011. . . .

‘Last year, Chinese companies bought $41 million worth of live breeding animals and genetics, up threefold from five years ago, according to the Foreign Agricultural Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

‘The demand for breeder pigs, in particular, is increasing after China lifted a two-year ban on hog and pork imports last spring. . . .

‘These animals are not sold for meat. Their value is in their genes, which allow them to grow faster, fight off diseases better and give birth to more babies that survive than their Chinese counterparts.

‘The effect of a vastly larger, more efficient livestock sector in China would cause a major shift in the global market, particularly for grain demand.

‘Even if Chinese demand cools for U.S. meat exports, the pace of Beijing’s growing demand for grain is unlikely to wane or offer relief to global agricultural markets, which are struggling to keep up. . . .’

‘Ronald Lemenager, a professor of animal sciences at Purdue University in Indiana, said: “When you have a nation’s diet changing as rapidly as China’s, the most efficient way to build up production is to improve your animal genetics. We have the genetics they want.”’

Read the whole article at the New York Times: From the U.S., a future supply of livestock for China, 20 Apr 2012.

Filed under: Animal Breeding, Animal Feeding, China, Genetics, Intensification, PA, Pigs, Poultry, Trade, USA Tagged: New York Times, Reuters

Groundnuts (photo on Flickr by Stephen Eustace).

Jerome Bossuet, of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), based in Pantancheru, India, has an interesting article in the New Agriculturist last month about fodder innovations helping Indian dairy farmers.

Feed matters are big matters in this intensive dairy-producing country, because ‘Feed represents around 70 per cent of the cost of milk production . . . .’ But with most farm plots now too small to sustain both fodder and food crops and with areas of common grazing lands shrinking, milk prices have been rising.

Research groups are coming to the rescue by developing ‘dual-purpose’ varieties of sorghum, millet, pigeonpea and groundnut whose straw, leaves and stalks that remain after the grain or legume has been harvested are of higher-than-normal quality for feeding to farm animals and whose yields of grain for human consumption are also good.

‘Crop residues . . . are already an important source of fodder in India, providing more than 40 per cent of the available dry matter for feeding livestock; some experts estimate this could rise to 70 per cent by 2020. But residues, especially from cereals, are often of low nutritional quality, which affects the productivity of cattle and buffalo.’

The new dual-purpose crops manage to produce both high grain yields for people and nutritionally rich residues for their animal stock.

‘Anantapur district, in Andhra Pradesh, is a key groundnut producing region and also one of the most drought-prone areas in India. Seventy per cent of the agricultural land is planted with groundnut, supporting over 300,000 smallholders, therefore crop residues are mainly composed of groundnut stems, known as haulm. “Groundnut haulm’s energy and protein content, and its palatability and digestibility can vary significantly from one variety to another,” says Dr Michael Blummel, a scientist from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI).

‘In 2002, ICRISAT introduced an early maturing, high yield and drought-tolerant groundnut variety (ICGV91114), which produced 15 per cent higher pod yields, 17 per cent more haulm and better quality fodder than the locally grown variety. After giving their cows and buffalo the improved fodder, dairy farmers noticed an immediate impact as their milk production increased by 11 per cent.

‘A recent participatory feeding trial found that 400 ml of extra milk was produced daily by animals that had been fed the improved variety. A separate impact study by ILRI also estimated that during the main growing season, adopters would earn about 48,000 rupees per hectare (US$970 from sales of groundnuts and milk)—four times more than from growing the local variety. . . .

‘Dual-purpose crops have also created new value chains for the animal feed sector. In Hyderabad, for example, sorghum stover-based feed blocks are being marketed by animal feed companies. One block feeds one dairy animal per day, ensuring a production level of eight to 12 litres of milk per day compared to an average of three to four. Traders are therefore beginning to pay sorghum farmers a premium for their crop residues.

‘Following on from ILRI and ICRISAT’s innovative crop breeding research, the IFAD-supported MilkIT project, led by ILRI, aims to improve access to animal feed for poor dairy farmers in India and Tanzania by using dual-purpose crops. The ILRI and ICRISAT researchers, and members of the CGIAR’s Systemwide Livestock Program, are also transferring the dual-purpose crop breeding approach to African countries, through improved sorghum varieties. They are also studying the trade-offs when crop residues are used to feed animals, including the consequences for soil fertility. . . .’

Read the whole article at the New Agriculturist: Fodder innovations to help Indian dairy farmers, Mar 2012.

For more information, visit the websites of ILRI and ICRISAT.

Filed under: Animal Feeding, Buffalo, Cattle, Crop residues, Crop-Livestock, East Africa, Fodder, ILRI, India, Intensification, PA, PLE, South Asia, Tanzania Tagged: ICRISAT, IFAD, Michael Blummel, MilkIT, New Agriculturist, SLP

ILRI works with partners to help smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia intensify their farm production and lift themselves out of poverty.

Small-scale mixed crop-and-livestock farming is the backbone of agricultural economies throughout the developing world. Remarkably, these smallholder farming systems provide 70% of the world’s meat and 90% of the world’s milk.

The smallholder farmers themselves are entering an era of new opportunities and challenges, with change occurring at unprecedented rates due largely to the developing world’s rising human population, urbanization and household incomes. These trends are greatly increasing demand in developing countries for milk, meat and eggs. Hundreds of millions of crop-livestock farmers could make use of this on-going Livestock Revolution to raise their living standards by intensifying their farm production to produce more animals or animal foods for the growing livestock markets.

What stops many of them from doing so is extreme poverty. Subsistence farmers in developing countries lack basic resources and capacities, including those needed to adapt to the new opportunities presented by the Livestock Revolution. One of the first constraints they face in increasing their livestock production is lack of feed for their animals. Most of these farmers subsist on tiny plots of land, which are often degraded or located in marginal areas, while any common lands around their farms on which they might graze their ruminant animals are shrinking. What’s needed are new ways for these farmers to exploit their natural resources more efficiently so that those resources can support higher levels of livestock production without being further degraded.

Smallholder farmers also need new options that will help level the playing field so that they can compete with bigger players in livestock markets. They need ways to access appropriate markets for livestock feeds and products. They need new options that will encourage and allow them to respond to changing circumstances resulting from globalization, such as increasing fluctuations in the price of livestock, livestock products and livestock feeds and potential reductions in feed supplies due to more land being put to production of biofuels. They need information and support to adapt to the local impacts of climate change, such as drying or wetter climates, more erratic rainfall, and increased flooding. And they need cost-effective ways to reduce the amount of methane gas their ruminant animals produce, which account for a significant amount of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions that are causing global warming.

Discover more about this topic:

• News. updates, stories
• Photos
• Presentations
• Publications
• Feeds and fodder blog
• CGIAR Research Program on livestock and fish
• More on the ILRI website

Filed under: Animal Feeding Tagged: Feeds

For the November 2011 ‘liveSTOCK Exchange’ event at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Alexandra Jorge, who has taken over from Jean Hanson as manager of ILRI’s Genebank, reflects on ILRI’s forage research and the importance of the forage seeds genebank hosted at the ILRI campus in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

‘I joined ILRI in Ethiopia in 2003 as postdoctoral student working on the characterization of forages and tissue culture of legume forages. Four years later, I moved to Bioversity International, one of 15 centres belong to the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) but remained hosted at ILRI’s Addis Ababa campus. While at Bioversity International, I established a website that provided information on how to manage a crop and forages genebank under the supervision of Jean Hanson, who was leading the ILRI forage diversity team at the time. About a year ago, I became manager of the ILRI Forage Genebank.

‘Looking back at the past10 years, I feel that Jean Hanson left a huge legacy: a great and well-established genebank with a great team of people to run it. In addition, we also have several well-established field sites in Ethiopia that help to regenerate our forage seeds. And our key research laboratories have also been upgraded. Now our main objective is to see how our forage collection can help poor farmers to perform well and produce more.

‘We are all moving towards collaborative work, which includes sharing our experiences with research centres and partners as we seek to apply our knowledge and learn from others.

‘Some of the challenges we face in forages research include those resulting from climate change and competition for land between food crops and forages. Emerging diseases are also affecting some of our important forage crops. However, the fact that the world is realizing the importance of genebanks in preserving the diversity of our crops and how this diversity plays a role in improving global crop production is an incentive to support projects like this. This is especially critical because the world’s population is increasing, rapidly leading to rising demands for more food.’

Watch the 4-minute interview with Alexandra Jorge.

On 9 and 10 November 2011, the ILRI Board of Trustees hosted a 2-day ‘liveSTOCK Exchange’ to discuss and reflect on livestock research for development. The event synthesized sector and ILRI learning and helped frame future livestock research for development directions.

The liveSTOCK Exchange also marked the leadership and contributions of Dr. Carlos Seré as ILRI Director General. See all posts in this series / Sign up for email alerts

Filed under: Agriculture, Animal Feeding, Biodiversity, Ethiopia, Film and video, Forages, PA, PLE, Seeds Tagged: Alexandra Jorge, Ethiopia, Genebanks, Jean Hanson, livestockX

For the November 2011 ‘liveSTOCK Exchange’ event at ILRI, Keith Sones and Alan Duncan prepared an issue brief with lessons on ways to establish and facilitate multi-stakeholder networks on smallholder agriculture in developing countries. …

Between 2007 and 2010, the Fodder Adoption Project (FAP) – funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and coordinated by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) – adopted innovation systems approaches to address issues around inadequate livestock fodder.

This issue brief draws lessons on ways to establish and facilitate multi-stakeholder networks on smallholder agriculture in developing countries.

One of the clearest lessons is that different actors participate in multi-stakeholder networks when they can identify tangible benefits, preferably with an early pay-off, that justify their investment of time, effort and resources. Put more simply, the networks must provide positive tangible answers to the question ‘what’s in it for me’?

Across the project countries – Ethiopia, Syria, and Vietnam – such networks worked best in situations with good market access and infrastructure, with a wide range of stakeholders, and where challenges were clear and tangible.

Our experiences highlight the need for a new breed of professional with wide-ranging facilitation and brokerage skills. This has major implications for recruitment by research and development organizations as well as for academic curricula

The ten lessons from the project are grouped into four clusters: Mobilizing stakeholders and establishing networks; facilitating networks; evolution of networks; and the applicability of networks.

Download Issue Brief 1.

On 9 and 10 November 2011, the ILRI Board of Trustees hosted a 2-day ‘liveSTOCK Exchange’ to discuss and reflect on livestock research for development. The event synthesized sector and ILRI learning and helped frame future livestock research for development directions.

The liveSTOCK Exchange also marked the leadership and contributions of Dr. Carlos Seré as ILRI Director General. See all posts in this series / Sign up for email alerts

Filed under: Africa, Animal Feeding, Ethiopia, ILRI, Innovation Systems, Livestock, Livestock Systems, PLE, Project, Report, Research Tagged: FAP, IFAD, livestockX

Fodder Leaflets from Ethiopia

Feed scarcity in smallholder systems is a key constraint to improved livestock production in developing countries. However, development efforts which have taken a narrow technology-focused approach to dealing with feed scarcity have had limited success.

The IFAD-supported ‘Fodder Adoption Project’  ran between 2007 and 2010 and aimed to address issues around inadequate livestock fodder at  nine sites in Ethiopia, Syria and Vietnam, with a particular focus on the use of innovation systems approaches.

The project recently published 5 technical advisory notes drawing on the various country experiences:

• Credit through traders – enabling the poorest to engage in cattle fattening in Vietnam

• How can farmers move from being “cattle keepers” to “cattle producers”? A case from Vietnam

• Planted forage as an entry point to catalyse stakeholder action on broader livestock value chain issues – experiences from Ethiopia

• Building on local pockets of success: Some lessons on the process of up-scaling fodder and cattle development in Vietnam

• Building local stakeholder networks for livestock development – a case study from Syria

In addition, lessons and experiences from the countries were discussed at the end of project meeting in December 2010: view the discussions and reports online

Filed under: Animal Feeding, Ethiopia, Fodder, Forages, ILRI, Innovation Systems, Livestock, PLE, Value Chains, Vietnam Tagged: FAP, IFAD, Syria

Planting soy in the state of Paraná, Brazil (photograph via Flickr by Dami Izolan).

Daniel Kfouri reports in the New York Times that Brazil’s ‘$7 billion agreement signed last month—to produce six million tons of soybeans a year—is one of several struck in recent weeks as China hurries to shore up its food security and offset its growing reliance on crops from the United States by pursuing vast tracts of Latin America’s agricultural heartland.

‘Even as Brazil, Argentina and other nations move to impose limits on farmland purchases by foreigners, the Chinese are seeking to more directly control production themselves, taking their nation’s fervor for agricultural self-sufficiency overseas. . . .

‘While many welcome the investments, the aggressive push comes as Brazilian officials have begun questioning the “strategic partnership” with China encouraged by former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The Chinese have become so important to Brazil’s economy that it cannot do without them—and that is precisely what is making Brazil increasingly uneasy. . . .

‘China’s moves to buy land have made officials nervous. Last August, Luís Inácio Adams, Brazil’s attorney general, reinterpreted a 1971 law, making it significantly harder for foreigners to buy land in Brazil. Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, followed suit last month, sending a law to Congress limiting the size and concentration of rural land foreigners could own.

‘A World Bank study last year said that volatile food prices had brought a “rising tide” of large-scale farmland purchases in developing nations, and that China was among a small group of countries making most of the purchases. . . .

‘[A]s more of its people eat meat, China is expected to increase its soybean imports, mostly for animal feed, by more than 50 percent by 2020, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Last month, Chongqing Grains signed a $2.5 billion agreement to produce soybeans in the Brazilian state of Bahia. Last October, a Chinese group agreed to develop about 500,000 acres of farmland in Río Negro Province in Argentina.

‘In both cases, Chinese officials proposed buying large tracts of land before local officials steered them toward production agreements. . . .

‘In Goiás State, nearly 70 percent of the soy grown went to the Chinese last year, and the Chinese are seeking to use about 20 million acres of pastureland that has not been cultivated for decades. . . .

‘Farmers here say they share Chinese officials’ goal of breaking the stranglehold of international trading companies like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland. . . .’

Read the whole article at the New York Times: China’s interest in farmland makes Brazil uneasy, 26 May 2011.

Filed under: Agriculture, Animal Feeding, Asia, Brazil, China, Latin America, PA, Trade, USA Tagged: Land grabs, NYT, Soybeans

During the last four decades a number of animal-nutrition-based technologies and practices have been developed and used in developing countries, with varying degrees of success. Some technologies have produced profound beneficial effects and have been widely used; while others have shown potential on research stations but have not been taken up by farmers. To learn from these experiences, the FAO Animal Production and Health Division organised an e-conference from 1 to 30 September 2010.

The report of this e-conference has just been published. It presents the current status of animal nutrition practices and technologies being practiced in developing countries (especially South Asia) and an analysis of the reasons for their success or failure. It also contains a synthesis paper that summarises the major issues discussed by participants and presents conclusion drawn and lessons learned for the future.

Download the document … (FAO)

Filed under: Animal Feeding, Crop residues, Crop-Livestock, Fodder, Forages, India, Livestock, Livestock Systems Tagged: FAO

As part of the Feed Enhancement for Ethiopian Development (FEED) project, ACDI/VOCA reports that Ethiopian cooperatives and consumers are fighting food insecurity and benefiting from new feed and dairy plants.

In the project, ACDI/VOCA partnered with the Selale Dairy Producers Cooperative Union to make investments in local agricultural production to fill market gaps and improve local food quality and availability.

A major challenge to the development of Ethiopia’s livestock sector has been a lack of manufactured animal feed. The union’s new feed mill will overcome this challenge and boost the local economy. “Members of the union will have safe feed, with a significant reduction of nutritional problems as well as diseases and contamination.”

On the same day of the feed mill launch, the Selale Union laid the cornerstone for a new dairy-processing plant that will help farmers earn a fair price for their dairy products as well as improve cooperatives’ productivity.

Read more … (ACDI/VOCA)

Filed under: Africa, Animal Feeding, Dairying, Ethiopia, Livestock, Markets Tagged: ACDI/VOCA

This brief from the East Africa Dairy Development Project highlights key results of a baseline survey that was carried out to provide information on cattle production systems and current feeding practices in smallholder households in selected sites in Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda.

Download the paper

The East Africa Dairy Development (EADD) project is implemented by a consortium of partners led by Heifer International. It is currently being piloted in 18 sites in Kenya, 8 in Rwanda and 27 in Uganda. The overall goal of the project is to transform the lives of 179,000 families, or about 1 million people, by doubling household dairy income in 10 years through integrated interventions in dairy production, market access and knowledge application.

Filed under: Africa, Animal Feeding, Cattle, East Africa, ILRI, Kenya, MarketOpps, Rwanda, Uganda Tagged: EADD

A sheep grazing on grass in West Yorkshire (photo credit: Richard Carter’s Flickr Photostream).

Reuters reports this week that research funded by the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) shows that changing the diets of the country’s cows and sheep could reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases, which cause global warming.

‘Feeding the animals maize silage, naked oats and higher sugar grasses could reduce the amount of methane they produce, the study by Reading University and the Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences showed.

‘Agriculture accounts for around nine per cent of all British greenhouse gas emissions. Most of this comes from sheep, cows and goats.

‘Farming accounts for 41 per cent of Britain’s overall methane emissions, which are harmful to the environment.

‘A trial showed that high-sugar grasses could reduce an animal’s methane emissions by 20 per cent for every kg of weight gain and naked oats could reduce methane emissions from sheep by 33 percent. . . .’

Read the whole article at Reuters: New diets for cows, sheep could cut emissions, 4 April 2011.

Filed under: Animal Feeding, Europe, PA, UK Tagged: DEFRA, Greenhouse gas emissions, Methane, Reuters