At last week’s Africa-RISING ‘quick feed‘ project inception meeting, Werner Stür shared some of the reasons why improved animal feeding strategies seem not to be taken up, and some ways to address this. He started by arguing that current future livestock productivity challenges would benefit significantly from “a little more feed per animal.” He outlined … Continue reading
Under the title ‘Enhancing Livelihoods of Poor Livestock Keepers through Increased Use of Fodder’, the goal of this IFAD-funded Programme was to improve the livelihoods of poor livestock keepers in Ethiopia, Syria and Vietnam in a sustainable manner through increased access to and adoption of fodder interventions. With activities in Ethiopia, Syria and Vietnam and … Continue reading
On September 28, I joined Andre Van Rooyen (ICRISAT) and Ranjitha Puskur (ILRI) in a session on innovation platforms in agricultural research for development at the Rome AgriKnowledge share fair. For my presentation, I used experiences of the ‘Fodder Adoption Project in Ethiopia to illustrate how using the innovation systems approach shifted the focus of … Continue reading
At the “Techfit” workshop in Dehra Dun this week a group of scientist and development workers were in deep conversation about how to prioritize livestock feed technologies for different situations. Our task was to come up with a framework or tool that could be used by development agencies such as local NGO’s or extension offices. … Continue reading
In mid-September 2011, ILRI and partners organized a ‘TechFit ‘workshop to ‘develop and test an analytical framework that can be used to collect, structure, screen and prioritise possible feed technologies and interventions from multiple angles – technical, institutional, social and economic’. To better understand concrete feed technology ‘use cases’ and demands, the first day of … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
Forage seed supply continues to be an important constraint to improving feed resources for livestock in Ethiopia. Last week the Ethiopian Institute for Agricultural Research organized a National Forage Seed Workshop (May 12-14, 2011). There were a number of interesting presentations: what was clear from many of these is that forage development for livestock has … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
Feeding innovation 