Research on dry land is strategic place for ILRI to expand its research and development portfolio and Polly suggested her idea on forage management for dry land. In this virtual meeting, there are some discussion among Polly, Lance, Karen, Isabelle, et al. suggesting/implying that ILRI can study and improve disease control and breeding in dry land and contribute to pastoralists' livestock production and then their welfare. Since I could not find such an idea in this idea pool, let me suggest it. Also, there are ideas to identify what farmers really want and use stake-holder platform for improving resilience in arid land and so we can ask them to help us with their ideas and skills as well. ILRI also have social scientists who can do M&E. ILRI has all necessary skills and expertise and seems to have enough interests in this idea. So, why don't we spend more time on this idea?

I was told that Morris Agaba et al. have R&D project on improving goats by breeding and one of their sites is agro-pastoral area in Ethiopia. For breeding, we can study it as a first step.

Latest developments in ICTs offer a whole range of possibilities for surveillance, feedback to farmers and through that improve delivery of animal health services. However, there is still a shortage of expert veterinarians in the locations where it is needed. Therefore this project aims to use ICT tools for veterinary experts advising community animal health workers remotely (use of photos and videos). These experts could be located centrally and cover many cases per day and through that ensure early detection of epidemics, but most importantly, improve access to adequate veterinary advice by farmers.

Supporting smallholders requires more than only looking at one part of their production system. A wider approach looking at the whole farm helps to capitalize on cross-value chain linkages. To ensure sustainable income generation and increase resilience through diversification, we propose to explore possibilities for public-private partnerships addressing several issues on farms at the same time. Needed inputs such as veterinary services, feed, genetics and business development services can be delivered through a P3 business-hub approach. In Uganda and Vietnam pigs and poultry are often kept together, both requiring similar inputs and both contribute to income generation and food and nutrition security. Both species require similar housing and management system. In addition, given the close proximity to people, a ‘One Farm’ approach also allows to address food safety issues and develop systems to monitor emerging diseases more efficiently. We propose to test this approach in Uganda and Vietnam, where P3 systems are common.
This is a true cross project: cross region, cross value chains, cross programs

The challenge to the near future is to meet the demand for food under the presence of growing global population, political instabilities, economic and social changes and limited resource availability. It is no longer possible to rely on agricultural expansion via acquiring new and productive lands with the purpose of feeding future population which is going to reach 9 billion by 2050. There is also threat posed by climate variations, natural disasters and floods that are having devastating impact on surplus generated by global economic growth. This questions sustainability of future production, ecosystem, environment and our surrounding nature. The next generation is food insecure and there is no clear evidence that poverty and hunger will be reduced under current shocks at all levels.  Soon, we will be talking not about how to sustain but how to survive! .... and sustainable diversification is key for survival. Moving towards sustainable diversification requires not only producing sustainably and adapting to shocks but also changing peoples’ diets and wasting less food by developing education and training programs and also changing peoples’ habits and thinking. Sustainable diversification is more about exploration rather than exploitation.

Should we also consider sustainable diversification when we talk about sustainable intensification? It seems comprehensive research is required to investigate this topic from different angles.

Sustainability and scalability- the Holy Grail of CG research and the darling of donors - and one that has often eluded livestock interventions; but what if we had already found the secret, only we hadn’t noticed?

In this idea note we argue that ILRI’s approach to food safety in informal markets has already generated convincing evidence of sustainability, scale and substantial impacts and the time is ripe to take this promising approach to animal and vegetable value chains in Africa and Asia.

The latest estimates from the World Health Organisation estimate that foodborne disease is responsible for nearly one third of diarrhea in developing countries. As diarrhea is the second most important disease in terms of health burden this makes foodborne disease a major public health priority.

Most foodborne disease is caused by microbial pathogens and comes from fresh foods sold in informal markets. And food safety is not only a priority health issue, it is also a standards issue which is already excluding smallholders from export markets and supermarkets and threatens to exclude them from wet markets also.

In the early 2000’s ILRI started working in the smallholder dairy chain in Kenya. Food safety was not seen as a desired objective but rather a constraint to smallholder development! Fortunately, the solution arrived at – training and certifying of vendors and providing a enabling policy environment – was shown to improve the safety of milk as well as to save the Kenyan economy millions of dollars a year.

The model was extended and adapted to butchers in Nigeria, and milk traders in Assam, India and Tanzania, and is being actively research in other livestock and fish value chains.

Nine years after the Smallholder Dairy project ended in Kenya and three years after the Traditional Milk project ended in Guwahti, Assam, we are re-evaluating the results. We find that many traders are in the schemes (70% in Guwahti and at least 25-70% in Kenya). The project beneffited the Kenyan economy by around USD 33 million annually and the economy of Guwahati, by USD 6 million annually. Traders have been shown to have better practices and safer milk and an estimated 6.5 million consumers are benefitting from safer milk. In Nigeria, most butchers in the largest market in Ibadan participated in the scheme, leading to 20% more meat samples meeting standards. Training and $9 per butcher but resulted in savings $780/per butcher per year from reduced cost of human illness.

Safe food, fair food works and offers the opportunity to improve the health of consumers and the wealth of the smallholders and value chain actors who feed Africa and Asia. Now is the time to make the case for extending the approach more widely.

There is no efficient and adequate animal waste treatment in Vietnam, which leads to increasing environmental issues associated with the productive process. Most of the waste from intensive farming systems have become externalities for farmers as well as to the rest of society. It is known that animal waste produces methane gas, which is 25 times more harmful to the environment than carbon dioxide. According to some sources 78.500 million tons of animal waste is generated per year in Vietnam and quite a significant portion is dumped into the environment. A technology that contributes to better management of methane emissions from animal waste is the use of biogas. Biogas technology brings not only ecological but also economic and social benefits. In recent years, rising energy and fertilizer prices, and incentives for renewable energy production have increased the value of outputs from livestock waste-to-energy systems.

A biogas plant is easy to set up, even in smallholder farming systems, because it does not require much investment. A biogas plant stores the livestock manure in a brick dome-shaped tank and precludes the harmful methane gases from going into the atmosphere as the waste undergoes chemical decomposition. Instead, the methane gas is harvested to provide energy for lightening and cooking in the home. A small-scale farmer with only a few animals (about five pigs or two cows) can readily set up a biogas plant.

The primary objective of this research is to study environmental impact of intensive livestock production systems and how the use of biodigesters (and consequently biogas generation) could be a viable option in waste treatment and management. It is clear that there is a need to conduct research (for development) that provides evidence for better utilization of readily available renewable energy source to be fully tapped which can bring immense benefits to farmers and to society as a whole.  Considering ILRI's experience in this area and taking into account demand for such research within country, this work has a great potential for collaborative work within ILRI programs.

In developed countries feeding standards are established and published for several species of livestock. These standards are application to most farmers  because management is  homogeneous and breeds well defined.  However this is not the case for small holders farmers here in Africa.  Given limited resources in the small holder, a quick method to  prediction of minimum nutrient requirement to ensure improved productivity will be beneficial to the small holder system. Such  a quick prediction method will be based on the establishing a protocol for measuring condition score and body weight ( both easy to measure) and  minimum nutrient requirement prediction  tailored to the farmer and his management system. I think  this is a good idea that is easily to implement  with immediate impact.

One of the major public health challenges faced by humanity this century is the development of antimicrobial resistance in many important pathogens. Beyond the abuse antibiotics in medicine, the burgeoning use of antimicrobials in livestock production is exacerbating this problem. Demand growth in developing economies (especially the BRICS countries) is driving a poorly regulated growth in livestock production that is expected to more or less double antimicrobial use in the livestock sector by 2030.

In developing countries, there is a dual problem of lack of access to antimicrobials among smallholders and over-use in the intensive sector. Policies aimed to reduce use may have negative impacts on food security. Moreover, the agriculture practices in developing countries are likely to have a higher dependency on antibiotics because of a more disease-prone environment and lower levels of biosecurity.

With growing transportation networks and international trade pathogens travel quickly around the world making this a global problem, calling for global solutions. It is also a multi-sectoral issue – involving, for example, consumers of animal source foods, the retail industry, livestock farmers, the livestock feed industry, animal health practitioners, regulatory bodies, the pharmaceutical industry and the medical sector.

Providing reliable evidence to guide multi-stakeholder platforms will be essential to bring about the practice changes needed to reduce the contribution of the livestock sector to the growing risk to society of antimicrobial resistance.

The idea here is to lead a major effort to improve our estimates of antimicrobial use in livestock production and to develop analytical frameworks that link antimicrobial use in the livestock sector to the development of antimicrobial resistance. This will build on ILRI’s work on livestock density and production systems mapping, predicting system changes in response to growing demand, and our understanding of antimicrobial use in livestock production.

Forages are the key for better livestock production. So, the higher amount of forage production is very important for the farmers. If the productivity will be high then the cost of the forages in the market will be less and ultimately it affects the cost of production of livestock, which benefits the farmers as well as consumers. But unfortunately, a huge forage productivity loss is happening every year due to unknown diseases and we do not know even the actual causal agent. Also, nobody has studied about the extent of productivity loss due to these diseases. A very less work has been done in this area, especially in East Africa. It is expected that more number of viruses and phytoplasmas are available here, which affecting our forages, causing a huge productivity loss but still not diagnosed. So, there is a need of survey of the field across the country to find out the types of diseases and their causal agents, which helps in management of diseases and finally in reduction of the productivity loss. At the same time we can also estimate the amount of productivity loss due to these diseases.

Please give your comments.

Integration is a very important and key term in the implementation of project initiatives at various scales.  We can minimize wastage of resources and duplication of efforts if we integrate our research approaches. However, the practical application of “Integration” within institutions and projects, and between institutions and projects is far behind. There is no also a very good model for integration at institution and project level that can serve as a bench mark for national and international research systems. There is really a need to pilot “Integration” through developing a system based project on priority issues and generate how it works at various scales. The lesson from this pilot research can be shared and serve as a model for wider use.