Inception of a new project on livestock feed development for dairy value chains in India and Tanzania

Following completion of the IFAD-funded Fodder Adoption Project, IFAD recently agreed to fund a further project on feed enhancement for dairy value chains in India and Tanzania. The project will be implemented by ILRI with CIAT as a major partner. We are calling the project MilkIT (Milk in India and Tanzania) and the grant agreement was signed in October 2011. We expect activities to start in earnest in early 2012 with a pre-inception meeting in Nairobi. See the project flyer.

We will again be experimenting with innovation and value chain approaches to feed development. The project will be embedded within the new CGIAR Research Programme 3.7: More milk, meat and fish, for and by the poor.

The overall goal of the project will be to contribute to improved dairy-derived livelihoods in India and Tanzania via intensification of smallholder production focusing on enhancement of feeds and feeding using innovation and value chain approaches.

The objectives of the project are three-fold:

1.     Institutional strengthening: To strengthen use of value chain and innovation approaches among dairy stakeholders to improve feeding strategies for dairy cows.

2.       Productivity enhancement: To develop options for improved feeding strategies leading to yield enhancement with potential income benefits.

3.       Knowledge sharing: To strengthen knowledge sharing mechanisms on feed development strategies at local, regional and international levels

Activities on this project will start in earnest in early 2012 but already a number of preparatory steps have been taken to ensure rapid project start up. These have mainly related to scoping missions to the two study countries with a view to identifying project sites and partners. The main activities are summarized below:

Scoping visits:

Tanzania: A project team including Alan Duncan (Project Co-ordinator) and Brigitte Maass (Tanzania Country Co-ordinator) along with Ben Lukuyu and Amos Omore of ILRI visited Tanzania in August and conducted a 5 day tour of potential sites and partners. The visit began in Arusha and went by way of Tanga and Morogoro to Dar-es-Salaam. Meetings were arranged with a wide range of potential partners and stakeholders. The process was useful in raising awareness among potential partners about the incoming project. The visit also provided some pointers to potential project sites and these will be firmed up in a pre-inception meeting in Jan 2012.

Uttarakhand, India: a similar scoping visit was made to Uttarakhand by Alan Duncan and Nils Teufel (India Country Co-ordinator) in December 2012. The visit centred around two main locations, Dehra Dun and Almora. Stakeholder mini-workshops were held in each location introducing the project and gathering information on ongoing dairy activities and key current issues around dairy value chain development.

Meetings with IFAD country staff

During the scoping visit to Tanzania, a meeting was held with Dr Mwatima Juma,  Country Officer for IFAD Tanzania on 26 Aug, 2011. We discussed IFAD country priorities and introduced the MilkIT project to the country office. A similar meeting was held in the IFAD India country office on 23 Sept 2011.  Again the MilkIT project was introduced and its integration with the forthcoming Integrated Livelihood Support Programme in Uttarakhand was discussed.

Planning for implementation

Dates and agenda have been set for a pre-inception planning meeting in Nairobi on Jan 24/25, 2012. The meeting will develop site selection criteria, work on details of initial project activities, agree on partners and explore links with a sister project on dairy in Tanzania funded by Irish Aid.

We will continue to post updates about this project on this blog.

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The project is funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). It started in January 2012 and runs for three years

Basic project information

Project brochure

News on the project

Outputs from this project

Project wiki

This project is part of the CGIAR Research Program on Livestock and Fish.

 

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

We have been introducing a series of Technical Advisory Notes arising from the IFAD-funded Fodder Adoption Project on this blog. The last of these describes implementation of the project in Syria. Dr Asamoah Larbi (ex of the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas; ICARDA) writes:

“Feed scarcity prevents small-scale sheep and goat keepers in Syria from taking advantage of the growing market for livestock products to improve their livelihoods, build assets and escape poverty. This is due to poor access to information, credit, appropriate technologies; lack of enabling policies and institutions; and a weak extension system, input delivery services and fodder innovation capacity. The Syrian component of the IFAD-funded Fodder Adoption Project was implemented from 2007 to 2011 by ICARDA, community-based organizations (CBOs), and public and private sector partners to address the constraints. The overall objective of the project was to enhance livelihoods of poor livestock keepers through increased use of fodder.

Activities were implemented at three learning sites – El-Bab, (Aleppo province), Salamieh (Hama province) and Tal-Amri (Homs province). A network of partners led by ICARDA, including the Extension Directorate (ED) and Animal Wealth Resource Administration (AWRA) of the Syrian Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform (MAAR), Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (AKF), and farmers’ groups ran the activities at each site.

In terms of impacts, innovation capacity of the networks was strengthened through training, and joint learning by cross-site visits and field days. Informal seed systems were promoted to increase quality forage seed supply and farmer-to-farmer seed exchange. Farmers, research and development partners were trained in fodder and forage seed production and management of small ruminants. Appropriate fodder/forage seed production and feeding packages for small-scale lamb fattening and milk production were disseminated to more than 500 households, resulting in increased household forage production, and outputs of milk and meat and incomes.”

Read the full account here.

 

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

Development projects can often point to local pockets of success: examples of where a project has had real impact on smallholder livelihoods through some successful interventions. However the real challenge comes in taking such success to scale – this involves somehow embedding the processes that led to success into the ways of working of local stakeholders who will remain after the project reports have been written.

In this Technical Advisory Note from the Fodder Adoption Project, Werner Stur draws some lessons on how to scale out local success using a case from Ea Kar District in Vietnam. The local success was described in a previous post – it involved using planted fodder as a catalyst to enable subsistence cattle keepers to make the transition into keeping cattle for cash income.

According to Werner Stur “The key to successful up-scaling” was to:

(i) have a convincing example that showed that it was possible for comparable smallholder farm families to produce high-quality cattle competitively

(ii) build local coalitions for development which facilitated the adoption and development process

(iii) strengthen the capacity of local stakeholders in facilitating the fodder and cattle development process, supporting farmers in technical issues, and developing market access, and

(iv) support stakeholders at new sites by linking them with experienced counterparts in a site where things are working as well as linking them with other project participants in an informal network of professionals.

Read the full account here:

and you can watch a video where Werner Stur talks about up-scaling local successes in a previous post.

 

Planted forage as an entry point to catalyse stakeholder action on broader livestock value chain issues – experiences 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. In the Fodder Adoption Project, we experimented with the use of local stakeholder forums in our sites in Ethiopia to bring local stakeholders together to deal with feed scarcity issues.

In this Technical Advisory Note we describe our experiences in combining stakeholder forums with introductions of improved forage varieties at farm level. The note shows how innovation approaches worked well in a site with good market potential for dairy and where diverse actors were present. In a food insecure site dominated by public sector actors things were more challenging.

We draw a number of lessons from our experiences:

• Local stakeholder forums required some practical action on the ground to stimulate interest and enhance credibility – in our case the “engine of change” was planted forage but other practical entry points could work equally well.
• Diversity of actors seems to be a key element of successful stakeholder forums.
• Enhancing productivity at farm level is a good first step but needs to be quickly accompanied by actions to deal with other value chain constraints such as input provision and marketing arrangements.
• In food insecure environments the use of local stakeholder forums for value chain development can be challenging. In such cases a different thematic focus such as food-security, capacity building or improving livelihoods might be more appropriate; this may also require a different set of actors including social welfare and health actors.
• Establishing a coherent livestock innovation system requires experimentation, learning from mistakes and careful adaptation. During the pilot phase some external resources may be required to cover the costs of workshops and meetings, training and other support and to underwrite new interventions that carry some risk until proven.

Read the full account here.

See previous posts on cattle fattening and novel arrangements for credit through traders in Vietnam for some parallel similar experiences.

 

How can farmers move from being ‘cattle keepers’ to ‘cattle producers’? A case from Vietnam

Across the developing world, millions of smallholders keep livestock as a means of storing capital and as an insurance against hard times. This is a vital function for livestock – but it is associated with poverty. As demand for livestock products increases and systems become more intensive there are opportunities for subsistence livestock keepers to make the transition from being “cattle keepers” to “cattle producers”. Deriving some cash income from livestock production helps farmers to transition out of poverty.

In this Technical Advisory Note from the Fodder Adoption Project, Werner Stür (formerly of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, CIAT) describes the way in which scientists from CIAT and Tay Nguyen University worked with local farmers and other stakeholders to bring about widespread change in cattle production in Ea Kar District in Vietnam.

According to Werner Stür “The key to success was the combination of a convincing technology – farm-grown fodder – and an innovation process that was participatory, actor-oriented, and both production and market focused. The immediate benefits of easy access to fodder stimulated stakeholders’ interest and provided an entry point for innovation. As cattle production improved and stakeholders realised that they could produce high-quality animals, market opportunities became the key driver for change”.

Read the full account here

 

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

Lack of cash to purchase inputs is a major barrier to poor livestock keepers escaping poverty. Short-term credit is a potential solution but often local micro-finance institutions are unwilling to offer credit to the poorest due to lack of collateral. This was the situation faced by the poorest livestock keepers in Ea Kar District in Vietnam, one of the sites of the IFAD-funded Fodder Adoption Project.

In this Technical Advisory Note, Werner Stur (formerly of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, CIAT) describes the emergence of a novel arrangement for credit supply to allow the poorest to engage in cattle fattening. This involved a loan being offered to a local trader who then entered into a contractual arrangement with poor farmers to allow them to enter the cattle fattening business.

In consultation with community groups, local government, traders, banks and other key stakeholders the project discussed the reasons for low adoption by very poor households and agreed on finding ways to enable them to engage in and benefit from cattle fattening. In a test case, the local government arranged a low-interest loan for one local trader to buy 10 thin cattle for fattening. The trader entered into a contract with five poor households from the indigenous E De group. Each household agreed to fatten two animals for three months (and repeated for a second cycle with new animals). Technical training and support was provided by the extension office. The farmers successfully fattened cattle, achieving high growth rates, and received a payment of USD 107 for each animal fattened. The return to labour was USD 1.08 per hour, which was more than double the prevailing labour rate in the district.

Read the full account here.

See also a previous post on more general aspects of cattle fattening in the Ea Kar site.