 Hello, this is John McDermott, I'm the Director of Research at the International Livestock Research Institute, and I'm also the Chair of the Systemwide Livestock Program, which is a program that's been developed by the CGIR to bring together the initiatives of different centers across the CGIR in terms of improved livestock production. Over the years, the Systemwide Livestock Program has really focused on what I would say is the intensification of crop livestock systems, so how to bring the different elements of cropping systems together with livestock systems to make sure they benefit more of the farmers who work in those systems. Now, that may not seem all that important, but in fact, if you look at developing countries, what you'll see is there's at least a billion people involved in these smallholder livestock systems, and it's been estimated that something like 450 million farm families in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are involved in smallholder agriculture, and that almost all of them have both crops and livestock in these systems. So it's absolutely vital for both people, but also for the landscape involved because these smallholder systems cover most of the tropical farming systems, and most of them are smallholders. Now the Systemwide Livestock Program brings together kind of 12 centers who are looking at natural resources, crop management, as well as ill-read that works on livestock, and one of the key things we've been struggling with is how do we improve the performance of these systems so that people can get more income and more benefits out of them, but also that these systems can be sustainable. Because if you think about intensifying or improving agriculture in developing countries, there are lots of constraints. There's limited land, and most of these farms are quite small, the majority of them less than one hectare in size, and some of the people have very little land and they're just keeping animals around their household, so that's one issue, and then the other issue is that there's decreasing water availability, and in some places they're getting drier, and so how you manage water, how you manage soils are all critical pieces of the sustainability of these systems. Now one of the things we've been looking at is how the kind of crop biomass that's grown in these tropical systems can be used more effectively. If you think about how crops are used in these mixed systems, food coming from them is obviously a key priority, but they're also feeding animals, sometimes with the grains, but mostly with the crop residues and forages and other plants. Then there's also been increasingly thinking about how some of these tropical crops can be used for fuels, given the scarcity of energy in many places as a demand for that, and increasingly in these systems looking at sustainability, how crop residues can actually be fed back into the soil to make sure that the soils have adequate organic matter, that they have good soil structure, and they're preserved and maintained, so that they can keep the natural resource base on which farming depends. Now over time we've been looking at how crops can be used more effectively either for food or for feed, but now we're turning our attention more to this trade-off between whether you actually feed crop residues to animals, improve crop residues, or whether some of them should stay with the soil. We've been looking at different systems in the region in different regions, in terms of West Africa, Southern Africa, East Africa, and South Asia, in terms of what are the appropriate ways in which crop residues can be managed for crops and livestock, and this is quite a complicated issue. It also depends, it changes from region depending on the cropping systems, what livestock they keep, etc. And so we've been looking at how to have good regional studies which reflect well the regional realities of how this is done, as well as what are the kind of lessons we can learn between regions in terms of how much should be fed to the animals, or how much should be kept to feed the soils, essentially. Now in terms of the investments to do this, and how we can intensify crop livestock systems around these, there's both the kind of biophysical or productivity issues of how we can feed more animals, how we can grow more crops, how the manure from animals can go back in the system, etc., so there's those kind of agricultural productivity issues, but there's also the kind of institutional and policy issues in terms of how we can deliver inputs to people, how good advice can get to them, how policies can enable what's happening. So in the SLP, I think there's been a good discussion in terms of the crops coming in, the natural resources coming in in terms of water, land use, etc., and then how all these things can be put together for the benefit of farmers and others.