Indian dairy farmers learn better feeding methods to improve milk production

Ninety six dairy farmers (96) among them 44 females have been trained on “Feeding strategies to improve dairy production in Samastipur District of Bihar”. The one-day training programme was organised by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and partners of Bihar, India.

The main purpose of the training held March 30, 2012 was to create awareness among milk producing communities about the importance of a balanced ration feeding to dairy cattle. The farmers were introduced to the nutritive quality of locally available feeds and fodders and the proper utilization to improve the production of dairy cattle.

Most of the dairy farmers of this region have been utilizing one or two home-made feed ingredients as concentrate to feed dairy cattle along with wheat bhusa/chaffed paddy straw and green fodder to some extent. Only farmers with a strong financial background are using commercial marketed concentrate mixture.

Dr. S. P. Sahu, Consultant of ILRI discussed the protein, energy, minerals, salt and vitamins requirements of dairy cows so as achieve an adequate amount for efficient milk production and better reproductive efficiency. He stressed that high quality forage complemented with balanced concentrate mixtures made of locally available feed ingredients helps improve the quality of milk.

Many dairy farmers who took part in previous feeding trials shared their experiences and benefits with the participants. A demonstration session following the training helped the dairy farmers to learn how to prepare the balanced concentrate mixture manually using locally available feed ingredients at cheapest cost without compromising the nutritive quality of concentrate mixtures.

The training was oganised under the Cereal System Initiative South Asia (CSISA) project which seeks to decrease hunger and malnutrition and to increase food and income security of resource-poor farm families in South Asia through the accelerated development and inclusive deployment of new varieties, sustainable management technologies, and policies.

The projects’ key objectives are the widespread delivery and adaptation of production and post-harvest technologies to increase cereal production and raise incomes; crop and resource management practices for sustainable future cereal-based systems and introduction of high-yielding, abiotic stress-tolerant, and disease- and insect-resistant rice and wheat varieties and hybrids for current and future cereal and mixed crop-livestock systems.

Other aims include introduction of high-yielding, heat-tolerant and disease-resistant maize inbred lines and hybrids for current and future cereal and mixed crop-livestock systems, technology targeting and improved policies for inclusive agricultural growth and the creation of a new generation of scientists and professional agronomists for cereal systems research and management.

Partners in the project are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the United States Agency for International Development and the International Rice Research Institute.

 

Optimizing livelihood and environmental benefits from crop residues in Ethiopia

As part of an inter-regional study ‘optimizing benefits from crop residues in smallholder crop-livestock systems in Africa and South Asia’ sponsored by the CGIAR Systemwide Livestock Programme, the International Livestock Research Institute recently published a project report from the Ethiopia site.

Entitled ‘Optimizing livelihood and environmental benefits from crop residues in smallholder crop–livestock systems in western Oromia’, it reports from a Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) study to assess overall trends and prospects for crop–livestock production, characterize crop residue transactions, and identify major determinants of crop residue use.

The authors conclude that almost all farmers in the study areas follow crop–livestock mixed farming. Results indicate that crop residues are becoming an increasingly important production component and play an important role mainly as feed, fuel, sources of income and for soil nutrient management. However, the current trend towards increased feeding of crop residues to livestock has long term implications for soil fertility and hence local livelihoods.

Download the paper

 

ILRI seeks disease- and drought-resistant forages for livestock kept by smallholders

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) is evaluating drought-resistant, nutritious and palatable varieties of Napier grass to feed dairy cattle in Eastern Africa.

Speaking at a seminar on ‘Napier grass diversity studies and further application to other forages in ILRI, Ethiopia’, ILRI’s genebank manager, Maria Alexandra Jorge, said Napier grass (Pennisetum purpureum) continues to be the major feed for cut-and-carry stall-feeding (or ‘zero-grazing’) dairy systems in East Africa. Napier, commonly known as ‘elephant grass’, constitutes between 40 and 80% of the feed on such smallholder dairy farms.

The productivity of Napier grass in the region is threatened by emerging diseases and recurrent droughts. Jorge said the ILRI Gene Bank has received over one hundred DNA samples of materials from outside the ILRI system (from EMBRAPA, Brazil under the project Africa-Brazil, Agricultural innovation marketplace) whose DNA is being studied to see which ones may have additional diversity comparing to our current napier grass materials. The identified unique materials will be introduced to our collection and further tested in Eastern Africa for the unique characteristics being sought.

Climate change predictions for East Africa may indicate that the region will experience greater rainfall variability and more frequent and/or severe drought in some areas, with associated yield reductions in both feed and food crops. Unless new improved lines of Napier grass are made available, the livelihoods of farmers dependent on Napier grass as the main source of feed for their dairy animals may be harmed.

Jorge presented her findings at a seminar given at the end of a four-month stay at ILRI’s headquarters, in Nairobi, where she was attached to the Biosciences east and central Africa (BecA) hub as a fellow of an African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD) program. The ILRI Genebank is managed by staff of ILRI’s People Livestock and Environment Theme.

Shirley Tarawali, who directs ILRI’s People, Livestock and Environment Theme, was happy to see Alexandra Jorge successfully complete her rich experience at the ILRI BecA Hub. ‘The new technologies and methods Jorge has learned will advance ILRI’s research to protect and enhance Napier grass and other important feed resources in East Africa. Jorge’s training also strengthens the links between ILRI’s high-tech BecA Hub, in Nairobi, and the institute’s specialized forage laboratory and genebank, located in Ethiopia,’ said Dr Tarawali.

“It was a joy to work with Alexandra. She has demonstrated extraordinary work ethics, maturity and seriousness in what she does. She is also a very fast learner; she takes initiative in learning more things and she has great people’s skills”, said Dr Segenet Kelemu, the BecA hub Director.

The AWARD fellowship is a professional development program that strengthens the research and leadership skills of African women in agricultural science, empowering them to contribute more effectively to poverty alleviation and food security in sub-Saharan Africa. It is offered by the African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD), established in 2008, as a project of the Gender & Diversity Program of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
AWARD Fellows benefit from a two-year career development program focused on establishing mentoring partnerships, building science skills, and developing leadership capacity. The fellowships are awarded on the basis of intellectual merit, leadership capacity, and the potential of the scientist’s research to improve the daily lives of smallholder farmers, especially women.

 

Nkedianye successfully completes his PhD

David Nkedianye is all smiles as he celebrates his success after successfully defending his PhD. He is now officially qualified for the award of doctor of Philosophy in Ecology and Natural Resource Management from the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom.

“I feel really good that I have come to the end of it. It has been long and energy-sapping!” he says adding that although he never really felt like giving it up, he felt tired and in need of a break!

For the last five years, Nkedianye has been shuffling between Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences, Centre for the Study of Environmental Change and Sustainability and ILRI’s People, Livestock and Environment Theme.

He researched on drought-coping strategies among the Maasai of Southern Kenya (comparing Amboseli, Kitengela, Maasai Mara) and Northern Tanzania (Simanjiro Plains) with specific reference to the 2005-06 drought. He also sought to understand the levels of livestock-wealth inequalities and demographic changes within and across the four sites and how these are likely to influence coping and community resilience within a dynamic socio-ecological system.

In 2007, he was appointed a Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University’s Sustainability Science Program where he worked on Linking knowledge with action using community facilitators to span boundaries: Lessons from East Africa.

Nkedianye, who has a wonderful sense of humour offers this advice to the those who think working on the same thing for five years is a monotonous and thankless task: “It’s very likely you are better placed with what you’ve already started and know something about, there are endless battles to fight out there, and each has its down hills and up hills…Others have done it, you can also do it!”

His greatest motivation to keep his eyes to the grindstone was the excitement of doing something new, facing a new challenge and realizing his most recent (major) dream of successfully completing PhD studies! His family and “great colleagues at the PLE!” provided additional support and he is truly grateful.

He is now working part time at Africa Wildlife Fund-Kitengela Project. For the future, he hopes to curve a niche for himself working at the interface of communities, researchers and policy makers, linking knowledge with action.

 

Production and distribution networks now avail forage planting materials to smallholder dairy producers in East Africa

National Agricultural Research Systems (NARS), Non governmental organizations (NGOs) and the private sector have increased their focus on livestock feeds and are now producing and distributing forage seeds and Napier grass cuttings to meet demands from smallholder dairy farmers in East Africa.

The output target for the research leading to this outcome was highlighted in ILRI’s 2005-2007 medium term plan (Forage diversity saved, studied and used to contribute to agricultural sustainability of smallholder farming systems) under the people, Livestock and the Environment Theme.   This output was achieved through an approach that integrated provision of forage seeds and Napier grass cuttings from the ILRI Herbage Seed Unit with provision of information through the Tropical Forages interactive selection tool (http://www.tropicalforages.info) and training in forage seed production by ILRI.  ILRI has promoted access to forage seeds to enhance the use of forages in sustainable farming systems in sub-Saharan Africa and had been the major supplier of forage seeds in the region, providing over 7000 samples of 60 best bet lines of forage legumes, grasses and fodder trees to development workers, ministries, NGOs and farmers since 1990.  Work with national programs on disease-resistant Napier grass varieties to support the scaling out of smallholder dairy activities across East Africa was documented in the MTP 2008-2010.

Smallholder dairy farmers in East Africa have changed their land use to increase areas under forage production.  Forages are effective in increasing milk yields by as much as 50% while maintaining the natural resource base, with positive effects on soil fertility, increasing ground cover for stabilization and carbon sequestration. Napier grass is the most important forage crop used in dairy systems in Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia and in some areas constitutes between 40 to 80% of the forage for more than 0.3 million smallholder dairy farms in Kenya (Staal et al., 1997).  Introducing forages into the system is predicted to increase milk production by up to 30% (Orodho, 2006).  As a result of this increased demand for forage planting material, new opportunities to produce and distribute forage seeds and other planting materials have arisen.   Building upon the planting material and capacity strengthening from ILRI, NGOs, private and public sector have been able to respond to this demand by growing and distributing forage seed and planting material.

In Ethiopia, ILRI provided over 1 million cuttings of Napier grass in 2004 for distribution through the Ministry of Agriculture and provided 900kg of Sesbania seed in response to over 200 requests to NARS, NGOs and the private sector from 1990 to date. Sesbania has been widely used in the smallholder sector as shown in surveys in Ethiopia (Mekoya et al. 2008) and both Napier cuttings and Sesbania seeds are now being produced and disseminated to farmers in Ethiopia by a local seed company, Eden Field Agri–Seed Enterprise (attached) and Napier grass cuttings are being disseminated by the Adami Tulu Research Centre. Planting material of two smut-resistant Napier grass clones Kakamega I and II, originally provided from the in trust collection held by ILRI, are already being made available to farmers in Kenya.  The most productive Napier grass clone, Kakmega 1 is being grown at bulking sites maintained by Farmer Training Centres and Parent-teacher Associations and planting material is being disseminated from them through local delivery pathways and by farmer to farmer exchange (Mwendia et al., 2006).

References

Mekoya  et al,  2008.  Farmers’ perceptions about exotic multipurpose fodder trees and constraints to their adoption. Agroforest Syst. 73:141–153.

Orodho A.B.  2006.  The role and importance of Napier grass in the smallholder dairy industry in Kenya.   FAO Waicnet Information.

http://www.fao.org/waicent/Faoinfo/Agricult/aGp/agpc/doc/Newpub/napier/napier_kenya.htm
Staal et al, 1997. Characterisation of dairy systems supplying the Nairobi milk market. International Livestock Research Institute, Nairobi.

List of documented evidence:

Eden Field Agri–Seed Enterprise leaflet.

Fodder round table meeting presentations by Adami Tulu Research Centre http://dgroups.org/Community.aspx?c=28c01de6-0758-489d-b75b-2976cc114e8a

Research papers by Mekoya et al and Mwendia et al.

 

Adoption of a new approach to benefit crop livestock farmers

The Indian Council of Agricultural Research has adopted a new approach to integrated research combining crop breeding, selection and release with animal nutrition traits as an important research approach , bringing together the skills of plant breeders and animal scientists, and building upon collaborative research led by ILRI, the National Sorghum Research Centre and ICRISAT.

ILRI’s MTP for 2004-2006 included an output target on “the development and evaluation of innovations with farmers to enhance the animal feed value of major food crops in collaboration with other CGIAR centres”. The most important feed resources (at least 50% of the total) in India’s small holder systems, crop residues and farmers’ choices of varieties are influenced by the crop residue fodder traits in addition to grain yields.  Despite this, before initiation of research between ILRI’s animal nutritionists and ICRISAT’s crop breeders, crop breeding and selection had largely ignored such dimensions for residues from India’s major crops.  Addressing fodder quality and quantity required close collaboration between crop and livestock scientists; nutritionally significant cultivar-dependent variation and heritability; sufficient independence between fodder traits and primary traits (grain and pod yield) and technologies for quick and inexpensive phenotyping of large sets of samples for fodder quality traits.   Combining these through incorporating animal nutrition parameters into crop breeding and selection programmes of ICRISAT and subsequently in the case of sorghum, of the National Research Centre for Sorghum (NRCS) led to the identification of crop varieties able to provide both significant quantities of grain as well as improved quantity and quality of fodder.   Such results were described for groundnut (Blummel et al., 2005), sorghum (Seetharama et al., 2006) and millet (Bidinger et al., 2006; Hash et al., 2006).

Research to incorporate feed parameters into crop breeding and selection programmes with potential to increase fodder yield and quality without compromising grain yield for sorghum, millet and groundnut in India has been recognized as an important strategy, bringing together the skills of animal nutrition scientists with those of crop breeders to address animal feed constraints.  This resulted in the Indian Animal Nutrition Association World Conference making an emphatic and groundbreaking recommendation:  Considering the limited scope to increase acreage under fodder cultivation and also the experience of enhancing fodder quality together with grain quality, plant breeders and animal nutritionists need to develop joint research to address the requirement of food-feed-fuel crops.

This joint engagement of crop and animal scientists to address livestock feed issues represents a new step forward in national collaborative efforts in India.  The recommendation has been followed up with an agreed work plan between ILRI and ICAR to further pursue this topic.

Crop varieties with improved fodder parameters have a direct impact on animal productivity, a positive influence on the pricing of stover sold as animal feed, thereby contributing to income from both crop and livestock enterprises.  Furthermore, because the feed part of the crop plant is produced using the same resources (land, labour, capital, water) as the grain, there is a reduction in the pressure for potentially environmentally demanding animal feed production.   The dual-purpose groundnut variety ICGV 91114 has a potential domain of some 800,000 ha in the Ananthapur region of India alone.  Adoption of the new cultivar is estimated to increase household income by about US$175 per household/annum with 30% attributable to increased income from livestock because of the improved haulm fodder traits.  Sorghum varieties with improved fodder traits may impact on India’s 100 million mixed crop livestock farmers in the sorghum domain.  The implications stretch further than specific crops in India, with new partnerships between national and international research institutions pursing similar approaches for a number of other crops in different regions of the world (see examples in Kenya at: http://www.researchintouse.com/nrk/RIUinfo/PF/CPP51.htm

References

Blümmel et al, 2005.  Food-Fodder Traits in Groundnut.  Journal of the Semi-Arid Tropics 1, 1-3.

Hash et al, 2006. Genotype × environment interactions in food-feed traits in pearl millet cultivars. International Sorghum and Millets Newsletter 47, 153-157.

Seetharama et al, 2006. Fodder value in a wide range of sweet sorghum cultivars. Presented at Sixth Biennial conference of Animal Nutrition Association, Jummu, Dec.2006.  http://www.nrcsorghum.res.in/paperspresented.php

Evidence

1. Recommendation from the Indian Animal Nutrition Association World Conference (scanned relevant pages)
2. ICAR/ ILRI Work plan