 Five years ago in 2015, the United Nations agreed on a list of 17 sustainable development goals including ending hunger by 2030. Today, we aren't much closer to eradicating hunger. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 690 million people are still hungry. That's almost 9% of the world population and it's a bit unsettling. And we need to ask, how do we change agriculture to feed these people? With the climate changing, it's also really important to do this without damaging the environment. Welcome to the Boma. My name is Tim Ofayado and I'm your host. Each episode we dive deep into the world of livestock to learn how livestock contribute to sustainable food systems, livelihoods, and nutrition in the global south. Today, I want to talk about livestock and how they could potentially help fight hunger. In October 2020, a paper called a series report came out. It was this pretty unique study that was asking the development experts the following questions. Hey, how in the world are we doing it? Are we helping farmers produce more food? Are farmers listening to our advice? How can we as researchers be better and help farmers solve world hunger? The report looked at research areas like climate resiliency, employment, food waste, water scarcity, and livestock. Yeah, that's right, livestock. If you come from a specific part of the world or from a specific discipline, if you see cattle, you see milk immediately. You say, okay, people keep cattle for milk. But actually, some people keep cattle for something like manure or like prestige. And I think it's really important for researchers and development agents to first understand how are people deriving a livelihood in that area? I believe that we have to first really look at a general assessment. It's really about ensuring that what we are proposing is relevant and is sustainable as well for bad communities. Isabel Boltonwick is program leader of the policies, institutions, and livelihoods program at the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, Kenya. She was the lead author of one of the series 2030 papers on better feed for livestock. Over the years, researchers have tried to help livestock farmers solve hunger by introducing new feed options, like different varieties of grasses and trees. They tested how well the feed grew in the field or nourished an animal, but it was hard to tell if better feed translated to less hunger. If farmers had more money to buy food, or if animal products like milk, meat, or eggs were easier to access and if they decreased malnutrition. Isabel and her colleagues looked at over 22,000 papers on livestock feed to see if there was any impact on income, nutrition, or workload. Essentially asking if and when farmers used the drives of development experts did their livelihoods improve? Isabel told Jeremy Chervis about what they found and how research needs to evolve to become more effective. Researchers, and you know I'm learning myself, I really seem to be more interested in checking whether a particular forage or a particular crop residue, what is the impact in terms of animal productivity changes in an experiment, whether farmers actually care, actually see a benefit in those feed options. We didn't want to look at paper that do a feed trials in terms of if I give x more kilos of that forage to an animal, how much more milk or much more weight gain, that animal will get. But really about if I propose all those new feed options to the farmers, will actually people use them, will actually decide to allocate more land, more labor, more resources to plan to grow those feed options and what will be the impact on productivity of the animal and what will be the impact on people's income or nutrition. And this is where we have failed I think as researchers. In terms of really asking those kinds of questions and not only being interested in you know how much more kilos of, which are interesting obviously it's a starting point, but it's really about whether farmers have all the ingredients, all the incentives and are able to you know get the right credit, the right land, the right resources to actually use them for their own benefits. But there were a few studies that did actually manage to look at all these things. So what was what were the results? Yes, it's really about really matching the feed options to the farmers conditions. We're looking at the extension providing the right kind of trainings or access to the inputs like seed. All those new options require either you know more capital, more labor. It's really about targeting livestock keepers who have an interest or who have an option to sell the end product with milk or the animal to the market. If it's mainly for home consumption, it's very difficult for livestock keepers to start shifting resources within the household to be able to adopt that new option. So it's really about understanding the system as a whole and in a way putting ourselves in the shoes of that livestock keepers and asking ourselves will we actually adopt that new options, new feed options if I was that livestock keepers. But when farmers do have access to markets and they do have maybe a little bit of capital and access to extension services, when they adopt these new feeding regimes, do they in fact get productivity? Do they get better livelihoods? Yeah, yeah. The results were we had actually so we have so few papers that the range of effect is extremely large because we are comparing for example, planted forage with our forestry in terms of duration, it's extremely different. But yes, productivity change has been seen. We've seen that for planted forages, productivity change ranged from plus 10 to plus 30 percent. So not quite a substantial increase. Property due actually, this is one of the point of the paper that we kind of had foreseen it. The fact that as livestock scientists, we haven't sufficiently looked at crop residues as a feasible and as a potential feed options, I think was reinforced here. And crop residue as well has been seen as having a good impact, a good effect on productivity. We didn't have any papers that looked at the effect of crop residue on income or on margin or on labor use, for example. But in terms of planted forages and agroforestry, we have identified a few papers, five papers actually for planted forages and three only for agroforestry with respect to change in household income. And some of those effects were actually quite substantial because you actually change in completely a farming system when you introduce a new forage for example, and therefore you see an extremely large increase in productivity. One thing that was apparent from this study was that not many researchers are actually asking if farmers will use a livestock feeder to venture. 73 out of 22,000 papers asked that question. That's less than 1% of the existing research. It's tiny, miniscule, and honestly a little disheartening. But what's a bit more shocking than that is the number of studies that also looked at whether farmers livelihoods and livestock productivity changed as a result. Six studies. Six studies out of that 1% looked at if farmers were doing better in achieving more. Few studies also had anything to say about the way farmers could make use of crop residues, leaving us with more questions than answers. Isabel Boltonvig tells us they expected as much because not many livestock scientists have studied the importance of crop residues to subsistence farmers in the global south. Okay, so you're probably wondering what are crop residues? They're crop leftovers. They are the parts of the plant that humans normally do not eat. For instance, when a farmer harvests ground nuts, which you might know as peanuts, they're left with the top of the plant, a small green bush. We eat the ground nuts, the nuts that are in the ground, but we don't eat that green part. So rather than let this go to waste, the farmers feed them to their cattle, their goats, cows, etc. And the ground nuts are sold at market or used in the household. And this is one of the main ways that livestock are fed in tropical regions. But plant breeding has changed dramatically since the Green Revolution. Plant breeders are more focused on producing smaller plants with higher yields of human food. They're not always thinking about breeding plants for leftover crop residue. So this has dramatically decreased the amount of residues that livestock farmers can use. So that's the way I suppose in research or any human being is working. We have kind of our own pet topic, right? And of course breeders, like breeders of wheat, breeders of maize, of brown nuts, their objective is really to look at human food, right? To increase food security through that channel, that angle. And it's sometimes difficult for us to work across disciplines. My colleague who just passed away actually a few weeks ago, Michael Blumell, was actually one of the few breeders who was able to really work and has done all his working life, working with crop breeders to not only consider grain, grain traits, but as well leaves and all other crop residues, traits when doing versus breeding programs. And he has been quite successful in India in particular. It's indeed a relatively easier way to influence livestock productivity because as well as the distribution channel of the seeds, ground nuts or maize or wheat, are already quite well established. And in a way, if you introduce the crop residue traits, if I may say that way, into the seeds, you actually don't have to do any extra work to as well influence livestock predictivities. And so therefore, on my perspective, I think I hope this paper will help crop breeders see more that potential of working with livestock scientists. Yeah, I mean, as you say, it can be done. And so there's a recommendation that maybe breeders should pay more attention to the overall productivity of the plants they're working with. I wonder what other recommendations you have coming out of the paper. So it's really about this, well, because of the so few papers, the 73 paper that really looked at the effect of those interventions on adoption, productivity and livelihood impact. I think as an economist, I really have to reach out better to the animal production scientists and them to do the same with people working on my topic, so that we really have to move beyond those feed trials and really be able to include impact assessment in more projects being able to actually observe or analyze and collect data in the longer term so that when a new feed options or applying as well to other parts of livestock, you know, animal health or genetics, we are actually able to capture those changes over time and indeed really start learning not by doing modeling, but as well by observing and collecting information on whether or not livestock keepers, you know, what are the constraints, what are the things that support them in using the new interventions and whether they make adjustments as well on the way that will be fed back to the research and what are the ultimate impacts in terms of all what we see already income, nutrition, labor as well across gender. So this need for more longer term, evaluation and impact assessment I think is what as well is a strong conclusion that we have not been serious enough in following up on those interventions. We've been, I think, pretty good at, you know, identifying new forages and new traits, but what it means in practice at the end of the day, I think we should really get a bit better into that. I find Isabel Boltonvist's critique of how research needs to change fascinated. For me, it highlights two things, the disconnect between researchers and farmers and the areas where partnerships and collaborations can thrive. On the first note, Isabel mentions that it's important for researchers to modify their approach and put themselves in the farmer's shoes, possibly asking questions like how are they farming? Are they keeping livestock for other reasons than milk or meat? Or what could stop farmers from changing how they feed their animals? By asking these questions, researchers can build projects that cater to the needs of the farmers. Isabel also spoke of the success that the researchers have had over the years, particularly mentioning that the best interventions happened in communities where farmers had access to market. It's a significant finding because donors and public officials can target funding to projects that are developing market opportunities or working with farmers who already have access to market. Equally as significant is a conversation around crop residues. Partnerships between plant readers, livestock scientists, economists, and others will be key to helping farmers gain access to improve feeds through crop residues. So what do future livestock feed studies need to do to improve? Find out what Isabel Bolton-Wick and her co-authors recommend in their paper by following the link in our episode description and visit WhyLivestockMatter.org to learn more about livestock in the future of food and to listen to new episodes of The Bulma. Special thanks to Isabel Bolton-Wick for interviewing with us and Jeremy Cherifes and Annabelle Slater for production and technical support. Keep joining us at The Bulma where we will continue to bring you more stories in the lab, desk, and field.