Over-grazing is more of a problem in more humid grasslands, while in drylands grazing is important to maintain grass cover and thus soil C sequestration due to the morphology of grasses, and over-grazing is less prevalent as well. On another note, in very dry areas manure is not as useful—at least when it has a high C:N ratio, it can even result in N immobilization if applied to crops.

Hi Klaus, do you have any plan in the near future of looking at livestock production systems in West Africa? I think we have good data on feed quantity, quality and animal performance (weight gain/loss, milk offtake) from past studies conducted by ILRI particularly in Niger.

Sedentary systems where the animals graze – but when you separate production from the feed-base, which is often the case wit h pigs, poultry and feed-lots the disconnect does not necessarily hinder expansion of numbers to meet demand – even if efficiency goes up.

Stuart, we are very aware of the GLEAM model. The principal thing hampering its utility in SSA is the lack of relevant data to inform the model. It is precisely on this which we are working.

Emily, I’m very interested in finding out how supply chain participants, and in particular abattoirs, handle their waste. Could we communicate on this please?
Rgds,
John

What is the potential to hook up with FAO on this and create a unique offering for climate change mitigation through better feeding practice? There would seem to me considerable areas of overlap with the work of ASSP (Duncan on FEAST , Blummel on dual purpose crops) and with BECA and CIAT on Brachiara. Here, a vehicle for such collaboration might be Livestock and Fish.

Is the Mazingira team looking at how much more carbon can be stored by improving rangeland health and productivity and restoring degraded rangelands, or is that done by another team (ecoservices?)