MilkIT India advisory council reviews project plans, sites, partners

On 1 June, members of the MilkIT project advisory council held their first meeting in Dehradun. Nils Teufel of the International Livestock Research Institute introduced the project and its intended activities.

View the presentation:

 

The subsequent question and answer session generated lively exchanges; the main questions – with answers – included:

1. What is the meaning of “innovation platform”?

• It’s about to bringing together experiences of a variety of stakeholders on
• dairy marketing, feed support , knowledge sharing and innovation/change
• regarding how to test & adapt these innovations.
• Innovation platforms are not only a discussion forum and not just an extension activity.

2. What will be the project output in Dec 2014 and who will receive it?

• As a research project, papers and reports will be major outputs, with IFAD being the first recipient.
• Research outputs will be aligned with the demands of donors and partners.
• Documentation of processes and results will enable global and local use.
• Documentation of establishment and success/failure of innovation platforms will be a major output. Induced changes will be a main indicator.

3. What will be language of dissemination?

• Main audience will be institutions. Therefore, first language will be English.
• However, for local institutions documents in Hindi will also be prepared.

4. What will be done to reduce livestock impact on forests?

• Feed requirements, current sources & opportunities will be assessed with FEAST
• General land-use change will not be a focus of MilkIT because of its short duration
• More efficient use of existing resources will probably emphasise farm products and labour efficiency (reducing forest use)
• Himmothan has already experience with introducing winter fodder. Forest use has already decreased.

5. How can MilkIT improve green fodder supply when the project is only 32 months and most green fodder comes from trees which yield only after 3-5 years?

• MilkIT will prioritise technologies (with the help of Techfit) which yield fast effects (no planting campaigns, no focus on breed improvement).
• More efficient use of existing feeds will be focus (supplementation, chopping) and wider use of under-utilised resources (grass-lands).

6. How will feed-related problems be identified? How will local capacity & willingness for adoption be considered?

• Innovation platforms will improve communication.
• Specific tools (e.g. Techfit) will enable efficient discussion.

7. What will be main project indicators, milk yield?

• Milk yield will be important, but profitability and labour returns will also be main indicators.
• Improved productivity will decrease pressure on forests.

8. How will other aspects of productivity be considered (breed, health) and who will be doing this?

• Within the project period no major breed improvement effects can be expected.
• But we know that local cows are being replaced with buffaloes.
• Feed improvements offer greater effect in improved animals with less labour.
• Where health issues are important we include local institutions in platform.
• How will the variation between households and animals be considered?
• MilkIT will only target groups (e.g. SHGs), not individual households/animals
• At the platform level discussions will have to consider for which type of households/animals technologies are suitable.
• When documenting effects we will have to collect household/animal data.

9. How is MilkIT going to compete with strong local dairy organisations?

• We will map which institutions are working on which issues.
• The innovation platforms will bring all relevant and willing actors together as a complementary activity.
• We are aware that compared to local institutions MilkIT will only show a brief appearance and cannot compete.

After reviewing work plans, members formed three groups discussing:

• Innovation platforms: “How can innovation platforms support development and dissemination of new technologies for dairy development?”
• Marketing constraints: “What are you most interested in for overcoming institutional and marketing constraints in the dairy sector?”
• Feeding constraints: “What should MilkIT produce to help with improving productivity of dairy animals among small holders through better feeding, breeding & health?”

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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.

 

Project team gathers in Tanga to kick-start MilkIT project

On 24-25 April scientists from India and Tanzania gathered in Tanga, Tanzania for the inception meeting of the IFAD-funded MilkIT project. The project is implemented by ILRI and CIAT are a major partner. This was the first opportunity for the whole project team to get together, familiarize themselves with the project and begin to develop activities.

Partners from the project in Tanzania are

• Sokoine University of Agriculture, Department of Animal Science and Production
• Tanzania Livestock Research Institute, Tanga-Centre, Tanga

and in India:

• Institute of Himalayan Environmental Research and Education (INHERE)
• Central Himalayan Rural Action Group (CHIRAG)

Representatives from each partner organization participated in the meeting.

MilkIT is being implemented under the umbrella of the Livestock and Fish Research Program of the CGIAR and we planned activities jointly with a related project in Tanzania funded by Irish Aid.

During the meetings we spent time aligning our thinking on some key concepts: innovation platforms and how they work; and value chain approaches. We also discussed site selection following recent scoping visits to various prospective sites. Partnership arrangements, gender considerations and links to IFAD programs were also on our agenda.

Finally we made a start on developing activity plans for Year 1.

So the MilkIT train has now left the station and we are looking forward to seeing activities begin to take shape in coming months.

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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.

 

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.

 

Workshop to Develop a Tool for Feed Technology Screening and Prioritisation 19-22 September 2011, Dehradun, India

Most would agree that feed is a key constraint to improving livestock productivity in smallholder systems. So the development community often attempts to deal with the feed issue through introduction of new ways of feeding animals (technologies). These may include improved forages and dual purpose crops, methods for processing crop residues, or introducing high quality supplementary feeds.

But how do we decide which feed technologies will work and be beneficial to smallholder livestock keepers in specific situations? The decision making process surrounding technologies seems to often be ad hoc and rather narrow. Aspects such as labour availability,  cost-benefit, availability of inputs, aspects of risk, and the  level of knowledge required for successful implementation are often not systematically considered. This has led to increasing distrust and repeated failures.

With all this in mind, next week a group of scientists, development practitioners and representatives of the private sector will meet in Dehra Dun to begin to develop a methodology to help people screen and prioritize feed technologies for different situations.

Why this workshop?

The objective is to develop and field test an analytical framework tool that can be used to: (i) collect (ii) structure (iii) screen and (iv) prioritise possible feed technologies and interventions using a set of general approaches, generic classifications and critical parameters from multiple angles (technical, institutional, policy, social and economic) in various contexts…

The results of the workshop and the field testing will be condensed into a booklet suitable for wider distribution and application. It will contain the justification, the approaches/methodology and some application examples of how the technology prioritisation tool can be used.

The aim is to move beyond a mere concept but rather develop a prototype tool, which can then be tested and further improved in the various upcoming research activities.

You can read more about the rationale for the workshop and the process we intend to use here:

http://techfit.wikispaces.com/

The workshop is hosted by the “Enhancing livelihoods through livestock knowledge systems (ELKS)” project.

 

 

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.

 

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.

 

Forages and farmers – Case studies from South-East Asia

Last week in Laos, Werner Stur circulated copies of a new book by ACIAR and CIAT with stories of innovative farmers, both men and women, who transformed marginal farming into productive, profitable and market-oriented enterprises.

The 11 case studies presented were collected from upland areas of Indonesia, Laos, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. They document the nature and scale of livelihood impacts that can emerge from the combination of robust forage varieties, sound management practices and research approaches that encourage farmer innovation.

Download the report …

 

Final meeting of the Fodder Adoption Project in November 2010

The Fodder Adoption Project is drawing to a close at the end of 2010. Next week (15-19 Nov, 2010) we will hold our final co-ordination meeting in Laos PDR to review research findings and draw out some lessons. Some 30 participants from around the world will participate. As well as reviewing FAP we have also arranged a mini-symposium on “Feed in Smallholder Systems” where we will consider livestock feeding issues in smallholder systems and what some of the constraints are to enhancing feed availability, market orientation and livelihoods among poor livestock keepers.

Details of the programme are here: Laos meeting programme

We will be using the blog to report on what is discussed at the meeting including posting of presentations, video clips and reflections from participants. Please feel free to comment on any postings so that your views can also be added to the mix. We will keep posting on this blog beyond the end of FAP on issues related to feed in smallholder systems.

Watch this space…

 

Vietnam cattle marketing study shows benefits of embedding forage development within a larger market context

Although feed is a major constraint in smallholder systems, upgrading of feed resources is often driven by enhanced market access for livestock products.

In one of our sites in Vietnam, intensive grass production for stall feeding to cattle has taken off in a big way. In part, this has been driven by enhanced access to distant cattle markets in major cities. Having a market for high quality beef makes it worthwhile for farmers to invest in better feeding for cattle.

This work is reported in a recent working paper by Truong Tan Khanh of Tay Nguyen University and his colleagues in Vietnam.  Download the report:  Assessment of cattle marketing in Ea Kar district, Daklak, Vietnam in 2008

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Final meeting of Fodder Innovation Project – some reflections

I’m just back from Hyderabad where I attended the final conference of the Fodder Innovation Project, a sister project to FAP which has been funded by DFID for work in India and Nigeria. This project takes as its premise that fodder scarcity is an “innovation capacity” problem rather than a technical problem. They have been experimenting with the use of “boundary organizations” to facilitate local networks to catalyse change in the livestock/fodder sector. In FAP we have followed the progress of FIP with interest over the years and found our interactions with project partners in FIP to stimulate our thinking. This meeting was no exception. Here are a few impressions I came away with:

-         Facilitating networks of local actors is hard work. In FIP the whole first year of the project was spent identifying partner organizations, explaining the innovation concepts, setting up baselines and establishing local networks. Such activities took a lot of time and hence resources. The transaction costs of such activity are not trivial and these need to be considered in assessing whether the use of actor networks to stimulate change is viable and sustainable in mainstream development practice.

-         Monitoring project progress in innovation projects is also challenging. Discussions with FIP colleagues made me realise that our difficulties in monitoring change are not unique. Innovation processes take longer time spans to mature than the conventional 3 year project cycle. Also, the change we are seeking is behavioural change at system level – finding indicators for such change is a real challenge. Conventional socio-economic baselines have limited value in such situations.

-         Attribution is also hard. Even if change can be effectively monitored, drawing causal links between such change and project activity associated with supporting networks of local actors is always open to challenge.

-         Markets are a key element in innovation systems. Most of the study cases in FIP had a strong market element. Innovation appears more likely in systems where markets are strong. In some of our more marginal FAP sites in Ethiopia where the system is food insecure, the configuration of actors is thin and the potential for stimulating stakeholder networks to facilitate change seems limited.

Despite these challenges, the case for a change in approach away from conventional technology-led approaches is, to my mind, overwhelming. Business as usual will lead to business as usual. After several decades of following a technology-driven approach feed scarcity is still a major constraint in smallholder systems across the developing world. We need new approaches but we need to continue to look for ways of overcoming the various challenges in projects which adopt an innovation approach.

Fodder Innovation Project website

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