Summary of Comments – Feed and Forage Biosciences

• Discussions focused on 4 main issues:

  1. How to better integrate work in Integrated Systems and Biosciences; Smaller programmes with few staff and resources are forced to work in a collaborative mode to deliver. Incentives are needed to foster collaboration across programmes, locations and disciplines to make better use of our resources and deliver appropriate products needed by smallholders.
  2. How to better integrate activities across programmes so that work in regions and systems can guide the selection of research topics that we work on in biosciences with feedback loops to ensure relevance of the final products.
  3. Other opportunities for forages; for example in pig and poultry systems or for NRM. There could be lots of benefits but use of forages comes down to the benefits and economics, trade-offs for land and labour for alternative land use and what other feeds are available and at what price.
  4. The focus of the feed and forage bioscience programme was raised in several comments and opportunities to apply cutting edge genomics to forage improvement were proposed. A comparison was made in the face to face meeting on the importance of genetic improvement in the crop centres and if ILRI is intending to start a forage improvement breeding programme. The current thinking for the programme is that the focus should be on identifying genes or gene variants for specific traits that can be used for selection for disease or drought tolerant genotypes but that ILRI is not currently thinking of starting a breeding programme on forages.

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