December 9, 2010

Crop residue tradeoffs in crop-livestock systems: Preliminary comparisons of the village- level surveys

Posted by Peter Ballantyne (ILRI) under Conservation Agriculture, Crop Residues | Tags: , , |
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Important components of the ‘Optimizing benefits from crop residues in smallholder crop-livestock systems in Africa and South Asia regional case studies’ project are village and household surveys in each of the four regions.

The village group surveys aim to capture: drivers and market access, communal feed resources, and systems evolution in term of feeding strategies and soil productivity. The thematic household surveys aim to capture: decision making for the allocation of crop residues, soil fertility management practices and feeding strategies, and retrospective questions to understand farm evolution and trajectories.

During is week’s project review and planning meeting, Diego Valbuena shared some comparative aggregated village data from the 7 different project sites – in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, India, Kenya and Zimbabwe.

See his presentation:

See the project proposal and flyer

See the meeting wiki page

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December 6, 2009

Livestock water productivity – integrated approaches to crops and livestock and integrated policies are needed

Posted by Peter Ballantyne (ILRI) under Crop Residues, Livestock-Water, LPG | Tags: , , , |
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Speaking at the December 2009 SLP meeting in Addis Ababa, Tilahun Amede (ILRI/IWMI) argues that livestock, although both a major source of livelihoods and user of water, are overlooked in policy-making on water productivity.

This IWMI/ILRI research project in Ethiopia and Zimbabwe aims to understand the dynamics – and the strategies – that can improve water and livestock productivity, while minimizing land degradation.

He shares three lessons emerging: First, that we need to improve the integration of crop and livestock; second, we meed to move policies from sectoral to integrated ones; and third, we need to ensure that the many useful technologies that exist actually reach the farmers.

View his video:

See a related video by Katrien Descheemaeker.

See his presentation: