The Legume CHOICE tool is a systematic approach which lists the various legume options available to farmers and prioritizes them for particular communities. Continue reading
The Feed Assessment Tool (FEAST) helps us to understand how local livestock are kept and fed. Standardized data visualizations give a good overview of where feed comes from, how it varies seasonally and what farmers view as the main problems and opportunities for feed improvement.
As part of this exercise, we produced a series of around 30 short Tech Sheets which provide a brief description of the main feed intervention options for developing world smallholder/pastoral systems. These help users to visualize possible options and understand how they fit varying local conditions. Continue reading
This extension brief, by International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) researchers and their partners in Zimbabwe, explains explains the best cultivation and management practices for lablab bean and its importance as a forage crop. Continue reading
This extension brief by International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) researchers and their partners in Zimbabwe, explains the importance of velvet bean as a forage crop and the best practices in managing the crop. Continue reading
The Feed Assessment Tool (FEAST) helps us to understand how local livestock are kept and fed. Standardized data visualizations give a good overview of where feed comes from, how it varies seasonally and what farmers view as the main problems and opportunities for feed improvement. In recent years, around 1000 people have downloaded the app. Here’s an update on a few recent developments with FEAST that may be of interest. Continue reading
This extension brief by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) shares the principles of silage making that smallholder farmers can use to make forage for feeding animals in dry seasons. Continue reading
This poster, produced for the Tropentag 2016 conference, highlights a study that compared digestible organic matter (dOM) and metabolizable energy (ME) estimates of tropical feeds derived from selected equations with those determined by the in vitro gas production method. Continue reading
Multi-stakeholder innovation platforms were set up at different levels as part of the milkIT project, resulting in more milk sales, more interactions and better linkages among different value chain actors in India, and, in Tanzania, access to a larger variety of better feeds. This video explains how the milkIT project worked with innovation platforms Continue reading
The milkIT project hypothesis was that improvements in milk markets would lead to increased productivity by farmers. This video explains the approaches followed: linking farmers to markets (using market ‘pull’ to drive productivity increases) and farmers’ productivity increases which will attract the market to them. Continue reading
The Feed Assessment Tool (FEAST) was one of the key tools used in the milkIT project to assess local feed resource availability and use, guiding targeting and appropriate intervention strategies. This video explains how FEAST was used in the project: Continue reading
Feeding innovation 