Forage seed training in Alamata

Forage seed supply is often raised as a key constraint to introduction of high quality forage in the smallholder systems we work in in Ethiopia. There is limited tradition of growing planted fodder and knowledge around the area of seed production and storage is rather limited. We recently organized and ran a short course on … Continue reading →

Moving from “project mode” to sustained change in practice among local actors – some challenges

We hear a lot these days about “project-led approaches”. Projects come in and deliver various interventions but these tend to leave no lasting impression beyond the life of the project. Such approaches tend to focus on technical interventions. One response has been to think more about innovation systems: dealing with the range of players already … Continue reading →

Summary of Fodder Roundtable meeting on Oct 15 09

Last October we held the 3rd in our series of Fodder Roundtable Meetings in Ethiopia. I put together this summary of the day, focusing especially on the synthesis discussion. Comments welcome. Here is a link to the summary: http://mahider.ilri.org/handle/10568/544 Continue reading →

Film: Stakeholder platforms enhance innovation in Ethiopian dairy system

In October we held a field day with local stakeholders at our Ada’a site. We invited both farmers from surrounding districts as well as other members of our local stakeholder group. In the morning we walked through fields and talked with farmers about their experiences of planting fodder and how this fitted into their dairy … Continue reading →

Third Project Co-ordination Meeting – Vietnam 17-19 Nov 2009

I recently returned from Vietnam where we held our 3rd co-ordination meeting for the project. As we are now entering the final year of the project one of the emphases was on developing our strategy for communicating findings to relevant audiences. We also thought quite a bit about “scaling out” of successful innovation and the … Continue reading →

Promising technologies not enough on their own to bring about widespread change in smallholder systems

In this short video, ILRI’s Alan Duncan introduces the IFAD-funded ‘Fodder Adoption Project’ based at ILRI. He outlines the approach followed in the project – trying to strike a balance between the technological and institutional angles. The project helps groups of stakeholders – farmers, private sector, dairy coops, the government – get together in ‘innovation … Continue reading →

Capturing and Communicating our outputs

Welcome to the Fodder Adoption Project blog. I hope this will be a more dynamic way of communicating what is happening within the project. As we come into the last year of the project I hope to use this blog to post various outputs emerging from the project. These will include working papers, meeting reports, … Continue reading →