Forages

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Thu 26 Oct 2006

African animal feeds: Two decades of research now freely available on the web

Posted by ILRIComms under Africa, Agriculture, Ethiopia, Feeds, Fodder, Forages, ILRI
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The most comprehensive and authoritative web-based resource on the nutritional values of livestock feeds in African agriculture has just been launched.

This month sees the launch of the ‘Sub-Saharan Africa Feed Information System’. This new web-based resource provides free access to a comprehensive database providing the nutritional values of feedstuffs used by small-scale farmers in 14 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. SSA Feeds provides data on 14,571 samples of 459 livestock feeds, including herbaceous forages, fodder trees and shrubs, cereals and legumes, roots and tubers, other food crops, concentrate feeds and agro-industrial by-products, mineral supplements and other less common feeds. These feeds were analyzed in the animal nutrition laboratories of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and the information made available through an initiative of the Systemwide Livestock Programme (SLP) of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

 

SSA Feeds: Authoritative, comprehensive and freely available online
This unique resource is the culmination of 26 years of extensive research and data collection. The newly launched product makes available twelve years of initial data collection that started in 1981. This resource is now being updated with thousands of additional entries encompassing 14 years of subsequent research. This makes SSA Feeds the Web’s most comprehensive and authoritative resource on the nutritional values of livestock feeds in African agriculture.

Salvador Fernández-Rivera, a Mexican livestock nutritionist based at ILRI’s principal campus in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, who coordinates SSA Feeds, is excited. ‘This is the first time that we have pulled together more than two decades of our research on animal feeds. SSA Feeds will be an invaluable resource for extension and development agents as well as livestock researchers. SSA Feeds will help them design optimal and scientifically based feeding systems for meat, dairy and draft animals. Better nourished and healthier livestock will enable Africa’s small-scale farmers improve their food and economic security.’

What the experts have to say about SSA Feeds
SSA Feeds was developed in conjunction with world experts in animal nutrition. These experts are already using the new resource and benefiting from having access to such depth and breadth of critical information on African animal feeds.

Adugna Tolera, an expert in animal nutrition and associate professor at the University of Hawassa, Ethiopia, advises his country’s feedlot industry on use of local feed resources. 

SSA Feeds is an important and rich source of information on the nutritive value of a wide range of sub-Saharan African feed resources. It is user-friendly for searching and summarizing the data on a given feed and enables the user to see the average value as well as the variability (range and standard deviation).

It would be useful if the database were further enriched by including similar data accumulated in many of the national agricultural research systems in this region of Africa.

—Dr Adugna Tolera


Hank Fitzhugh, former director general of ILRI and its Addis Ababa-based predecessor, the International Livestock Centre for Africa (ILCA), is an animal geneticist and livestock production systems specialist. He is leading a project to improve meat and livestock exports from Ethiopia. The project, which is funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and implemented by Texas A&M University, will fund the upgrading of the SSA Feeds database.

SSA Feeds demonstrates impacts from research.

This important database moves over 20 years of research off the shelf and into use by African livestock producers responding to the ‘livestock revolution—the huge increase in demand for meat and milk by consumers in developing countries.

— Dr Hank Fitzhugh


David Hutcheson is a worldwide expert on beef cattle nutrition, involved in projects in several countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. With a long and distinguished career in the university system and US beef industry, he also served on the Committee of the National Research Council (NRC) of the United States that established the current “Nutritional Requirements of Beef Cattle".

 

I have used SSA Feeds to develop a “Best Cost” ration concept for Ethiopia Feedlots. The database is user friendly and easily adapted to the “Best Cost” Excel program. The arrangement of the nutrient analyses and summary statistics allow for easy manipulation and export of the data into different programs, for applications in both research and producer situations.

— Dr David Hutcheson

Click on the graphic to visit the SSA Feeds website

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Tue 17 Oct 2006

World’s most diverse forage collection comes under new treaty

Posted by ILRIComms under Africa, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ethiopia, Forages, ILRI
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On Monday 16 October 2006, world leaders in agricultural research signed agreements that guarantee long-term access to some of the world's most important collections of agricultural biodiversity.

In a ceremony that took place on World Food Day, 11 centres belonging to the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) placed all their ex-situ genebank collections under the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, now ratified by 105 countries.

A livestock forage genebank maintained by one of these CGIAR centres, the Africa-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), conserves more than 18 thousand accessions of forages from over 1000 species. This is one of the most diverse collections of forage grasses, legumes and fodder tree species held in any genebank in the world and includes the world’s major collection of African grasses and tropical highland forages. In 1994, the germplasm collection held by ILRI was placed in trust under the auspices of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) as part of their international network of ex situ collections. Now, 12 years later, this trust collection comes under the purview of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture following the 16 October 2006 landmark agreement between CGIAR Centers and the governing body of the treaty.

As part of its commitment to maintaining the collection as a global public good, ILRI claims no ownership nor seeks any intellectual property rights over the germplasm and related information. Rather, ILRI conserves its diverse forage collection to make it and relevant information freely available to scientists and the national agricultural research systems of developing and other countries.

ILRI maintains both an active and base genebank at its site in Addis Ababa.

Active and base genebanks

The active genebank is used for current research and distribution of seeds. Seeds are dried in a dehumidified drying room and packed in laminated aluminium foil bags for storage in the active genebank at 8°C. All seeds in the active collection are freely available in small quantities to bona-fide forage research workers and distributed both directly and through networks.

The base genebank is used for long-term security storage of original germplasm collections. The base genebank acts as a repository of materials that have been reasonably characterized and which may or may not have current interest or use by plant breeders. Collected materials are preserved until such time as there are enough resources available for them to be characterized and evaluated. Materials are stored in the base genebank at -20°C.

Forage diversity activities at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)

Forage diversity as a global public good

ILRI and the other centres of the CGIAR hold more than 600,000 samples of crop-plant diversity. This includes wild relatives and more than half of the global total of farmer-created varieties, which are such a rich source of sought-after characteristics, for example to meet the challenge of climate change.
‘This really is an investment in food security,’ said Emile Frison, Director General of International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI), which is responsible for the world’s banana collection. ‘The genetic diversity created in the past by farmers and researchers is the foundation of improvements to meet the challenges of the future.”’

’Unless we can meet those challenges,’ Frison added, ‘there will be no food security.’
Mahmoud Solh, Director General of the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), said that the new agreements would ‘allow breeders and other researchers to tap the collections for solutions to the most pressing problems, such as drought, desertification, and food and nutritional security.’

Centre directors ‘warmly welcome’ the agreements and ‘commit themselves to supporting and implementing the Treaty’. A statement issued by the Alliance of CGIAR Centres sets out the centres’ common understanding of certain provisions of the agreements and indicates some actions that the centres will be taking to implement them.

Click here to view the statement of the CGIAR centres regarding implementation of the agreements between the centres and the governing body of the international treaty on plant genetic resources for food and agriculture.
 

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