Improved feeding and forages at a crossroads: Farming systems approaches for sustainable livestock development in East Africa

Abstract

Dairy development provides substantial potential economic opportunities for smallholder farmers in East Africa, but productivity is constrained by the scarcity of quantity and quality feed. Ruminant livestock production is also associated with negative environmental impacts, including greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, air pollution, high water consumption, land-use change, and loss of biodiversity. Improved livestock feeding and forages have been highlighted as key entry point to sustainable intensification, increasing food security, and decreasing environmental trade-offs including GHG emission intensities. In this perspective article, we argue that farming systems approaches are essential to understand the multiple roles and impacts of forages in smallholder livelihoods. First, we outline the unique position of forages in crop-livestock systems and systemic obstacles to adoption that call for multidisciplinary thinking. Second, we discuss the importance of matching forage technologies with agroecological and socioeconomic contexts and niches, and systems agronomy that is required. Third, we demonstrate the usefulness of farming systems modeling to estimate multidimensional impacts of forages and for reducing agro-environmental trade-offs. We conclude that improved forages in East Africa are at a crossroads: if adopted by farmers at scale, they can be a cornerstone of pathways toward sustainable livestock systems in East Africa.

Urochloa in Tropical Agroecosystems

“…Introduction of forage species is justified when it provides services to the agroecosystem (Foley et al, 2005;Cherr et al, 2006). These services may be related to nutrient supply, increased nutrient use efficiency (NUE), soil protection and health, weed suppression and/or to the enhancement of crop or companion crop production and yields; also, they should be suited to local socioeconomic context (Cherr et al, 2006;Horrocks et al, 2019;Paul et al, 2020). Some plant traits are linked to the provision of these services, such as adaptation to tropical environmental conditions, low soil fertility requirements, high biomass production capacity, biomass recalcitrance, efficient root morphology and exudation activity, to name a few (Cherr et al, 2006;Horrocks et al, 2019).…”

Tropical forage technologies can deliver multiple benefits in Sub-Saharan Africa. A meta-analysis

“…Adoption of tropical forage technologies, and underlying drivers and barriers, and incentives and enabling environment required to achieve impact at scale, deserves accelerated research attention. Tropical forages are an excellent case to explore and demonstrate the crucial need for multidisciplinary research on multidimensional impacts and tradeoffs technologies that are key to advance mixed crop-livestock systems (Paul et al 2020). There is a need for more comprehensive, multidisciplinary studies taking farming system approaches to assess the attractiveness of multiple benefits of forage technologies, depending on specific locations, opportunities, production objectives, and constraints.…”

“…Forage integration into cropping systems has often been highlighted as key to deliver multiple benefits to farmers, yet there are only few successful and published examples (Maass et al 2015;Paul et al 2020). Various studies focused on Desmodium spp.…”

“…The analysis suggests that tropical forages can deliver multiple benefits to smallholder farmers, although few studies investigated multiple effects simultaneously. Planted forages are uniquely positioned at a crossroads between various disciplines-agronomy, animal nutrition, and environmental sciences-linking crop, livestock, and soil components of farming systems (Paul et al 2020). Understanding whole system implications of forage introduction into a farming system is required-e.g., for estimating trade-offs in labor requirement or food security when intensifying livestock production (Ates et al 2018;Paul et al 2020).…”

“…Planted forages are uniquely positioned at a crossroads between various disciplines-agronomy, animal nutrition, and environmental sciences-linking crop, livestock, and soil components of farming systems (Paul et al 2020). Understanding whole system implications of forage introduction into a farming system is required-e.g., for estimating trade-offs in labor requirement or food security when intensifying livestock production (Ates et al 2018;Paul et al 2020). In fact, farmers seem to make decisions based on balancing or satisfying multiple objectives, instead of optimizing one single objective-which has been coined "satisficing behavior" (van Kooten et al 1986;Simon 1957).…”