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L&F Yammer Group
Day 3 Big issues: Intensification – Core driver?
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Presentation speakers
- Michael Blummel, ILRI
Should intensification remain the core driver of livestock and fish improvement initiatives with the CRP in its current form, and in some expanded form? A presentation by Michael Blummel (ILRI – India)
Click on the presentation and make comments below
Should intensification remain the core driver of livestock improvement initiatives with the Livestock and Fish Program from ILRIThe audio on this presentation did not work out and the speaker supplied this complementary text: Blummel-IS-in-Livestock and Fish Phase 2
Related Presentations
Intensification-Core Driver: Reference to aquaculture intensification: Focus on identification of aquaculture technologies that have least impact on environment but can be accessed by small farmers and linked effectively to markets. Scenario building and modelling work around these ideas to identify investment opportunities that can help develop small farmer inclusive business models to progress sustainable intensification of aquaculture
Thanks Michael, intensification is obviously an important focus for L&F I dont think it should be our only focus! In order to meet the needs of 2050 intensification will be only one part of the puzzle.
Agree. I look at it as a key mean to achieve our goals - not an end.
Let's think of sustainable intensification in a broader sense beyond the production level and on-farm environmental trade-offs. To be genuinely sustainable the intensification must deliver real access to animal source foods through well-governed value chains in which poor (and non-poor) men and women participate in inclusive ways and benefit equitably. This way SI (sustainable intensification) becomes a pretty large piece of the puzzle.
Thanks Michael
What about capacity building and adoption of BMP to build sustainable production systems.
Yes certainly they will all be necessary and contribute - but contribute to what? If our two rational from phase one, ie more ASF for and by the poor, are still relevant I cant see how we can achieve this without intensification
Thanks for this Michael. From your presentation, intensification can also be a strategy for mitigating feed scarcity. Is my interpretation right? If so, under a scenario of fixed natural resource (feed & forage) base, would feed scarcity still be an issue today if all livestock (and fish) were of the "optimal" breeds?
Acho interesting question - I did not calculate it comprehensively for all our species. For dairy in India re-allocation of available feed resources to fewer animals would support about 8 to 10 of of milk per day. This would get you along a considerable way see slide 4.
A comment on "optimal breeds" - please think of this as a combination of breed and management (feed, health-care, etc.) .... breeds with high productivity potential kept under low-input systems will still perform poorly
I agree with this point. Regardless of the breed, access to plentiful and nutritious feeds and forages should improve productivity. If we have more well-adapted, productive forages, then farmers may be able to increase their stocking rates, keep more animals, and/or improve live weight gain rates in their herds. This should increase the economic value of small scale livestock production systems and decrease GHG emissions per kg of meat produced. Of course the best possible scenario is the use of optimal breed AND forage/feed options for each environment!
Micheal. Thanks for your opinion piece. Intensification is the way forward. However, this has been the objective of research efforts for years with only success where the resource base is sufficient with profitable innovations and linkages to markets. You seem to stress intensification on animal unit. Land unit based intensification could enable a more holistic approach, or combining both would be even better as they are not mutually exclusive.
Yes Abdou and also Alan: Increase in unit land produce is definitely important and has potentially high impact. Still we need increased efficiency on the animal/fish to ASF produce interface too for environmental and socio-economic reasons
other interesting units are: per labour, per capital investment, per knowledge required...
Intensification as a core driver : Micheal thanks for this nice presentation (too bad that the sound did not work). I think this is the trickiest question that L&F has to answer. And probably the most important question behind this is, do we assume that intensification will lead to commercialization (which i have understood being the purpose of the value chain approach)?
For me there is a sort of contradiction in our objective (probably linked to my assumption). Imagine your farmer A with 5 cows, suddenly being able to have the cows that farmer B has. Will he really reduce his herd to 1 cows? or are we going to see emerging commercial farmers, (which for me is different from industrial farmers) and a concentration with fewer farmers with more animals with a higher productivity per animal (and mechanization) will be observed? (I guess this is what i have seen in Bihar, where agricultural labor has become scares, youth has left the area for better urban jobs and some young entrepreneurs are slowly emerging in the market with currently 25 cows and milking machines and an objective of 60 cows over the next 2 years). Are we then still talking of smallholders? or is the objective of L&F to move animal source food production to a commercially viable state, where our classical smallholder (with a backyard system,1-3 cows up to 20 chicken, 5 pigs) has disappeared ? Who is the farmers that will make the commercialization step ? is that the smallholder we have lifted up from subsistence to commercial ? or will the commercialization step be done by those who have the mean to invest into the new technologies and actually will be out competing "our classical smallholder" out of market (let's say to job outside of the agricultural sector, or be hired by the commercial farm)? Is there actually a space for smallholder in the livestock sector? if yes, under which conditions and for which type of livestock products?
If intensification remains the core of L&F, then there is a need to discuss the role and the definition of smallholders within our program.
Very true Catherine. In time there would be more meat, milk and fish for the poor.
If L&F has managed to help poor animal farmers get out of poverty, and rural populations out of agriculture into more value generating and labour-consuming agro-industries while still managing the landscapes sustainably, it would be a success.
Intensification is probably still the corner stone of the program but other skills (business development, complex multi-stakeholder system facilitation, monitoring and evaluation, environmental impact studies, economic valuation) will help introduce desirable outcomes from intensified production.
As I understand it there are important social and demographic shifts resulting in more people in urban and peri-urban areas. I t will be important to look at the poor as consumers also - and there is a need to produce food intensively to meet their demands.
intensification leading to commercialization (or increased market orientation), or the other way round? (some) conditions for intensification are pretty much linked to access to markets, both on the inputs& service side and also the output side. Transition to commercial farmers, if commercial means higher income & better livelihoods), how much time will it take? 1 generation or more? what can R and RinD do to ensure that women & men farmers, poor and less poor, have this opportunity? this is, I believe, our challenge. Thanks for starting the discussion on this topic!
Good presentation indeed. An yes SI must be at the core of LnF. However, as Catherine elaborate on above - the transformation of the small holders or the role in this process will likely not come without pain. What is socially acceptable and can it be mitigated….
I agree that sustainable intensification is an important concept which is intuitively correct because of the overall trends and future for demands ASFs. We see this happening in aquaculture and it's often the only way that farmers can stay in business. Costs, particularly feed costs, keep on rising but more production results in increased market competition or poor consumers cannot afford to pay the higher production prices so farmers have to become more efficient. How do you become more efficient? Through intensification and consolidation of farming units into larger units. But one scenario we are looking at is that this can result in the product becoming unsuitable for poor consumers. Fish farmers want to produce bigger fish because they can get a higher price/kg. But the bulk of the market is for small fish. So can we devise production systems producing more, smaller fish at minimal cost? The main strategy is to concentrate for more of the growth cycle on using fertilization rather than expensive feeding. Initial trials have been promising - now we need to find farmers who share our enthusiasm for the approach.
In Vietnam we are partnering with Wageningen and local research and development organisations on the 'Nutritious Pond' project (started in late 2014) which aims to optimize semi-intensive, polyculture systems where fish and shrimp feed increasingly on natural feeds/nutrients produced in the pond ecosystem. I.e. intensification through less external feed inputs, relying more on and enhancing existing ecosystem services/functions within a pond.
Intensification? - yes - in more consumable kgs per unit of production area/vol. Polyculture that you describe here is low input but need not be. Where along the none to some input does this process lead to an optimum. How far has the polyculture concept gone beyond just terrestrial or just aquatic systems. Examples exist in rice paddy - rice fish work. Again more room for systems work in this area.
Yes there are key questions around small holder systems which we probably discuss not enough.
On 5 low to 1 high yielding animal: the general question is: would there be production of ASF beyond demand. In practice many development actors in dairy in India look at a 8 to 12 improved animal dairy farm as economically sustainable in the future. However rising labour costs already challenge this
Crop residues are a key component of developing world livestock diets. Cereal yield gaps are large and the "one tonne per hectare" yields that have been a feature of African farming systems for the last few decades are limiting also livestock productivity. If our crop centre colleagues make progress in closing these yield gaps it will go a long way to satisfying the increased demand for feed that Michael alludes to.
Alan yes as long as the quality of the CR is high enough not to be constricted too much by intake. Still a side effect would to make feed cheaper which would already help our clients
Thanks Michael, I enjoyed watching the slides; a few comments:
Slide 2: Intensification only addresses one component of a food system, i.e. production ~ “by the poor”; to address “for the poor” this needs to be complemented with work on access to food, waste management, markets, etc
Slide 4: it will be important to look at where the feed is grown and if it is in competition with land that can be used for human food production(especially so for the crops that are grown for feed specifically)
Slide 5: I agree with your statement that some elements of intensification will always be required. I would explicitly expand it SUSTAINABLE intensification, and look at –as you suggest- all three sustainability dimensions: social, economic and environmental.
I think intensification needs to be looked at both from the objectives of livestock keepers and the limiting factors given their circumstances. In some cases the focus could be intensification per unit animal and in another per unit of factor of production. This entails a broader definition of intensification which goes beyond increased productivity. The marketing side of the equation is as important. The intensification we are interested in is about transforming the livestock and fish production system. This is I believe broader than optimizing production for the purpose of increased efficiency. Therefore, as suggested by some it needs to be broadly conceptualized.
I think intensification needs to be looked at both from the objectives of livestock keepers and from the limiting factors given keepers' circumstances. In some cases the focus could be intensification per unit animal and in another per unit of a factor of production. This entails a broader definition of intensification which goes beyond increased productivity. The marketing side of the equation is as important. The intensification we are interested in is about transforming the livestock and fish production system. This is I believe broader than optimizing production for the purpose of increased efficiency. Therefore, as suggested by some it needs to be broadly conceptualized.
That is two comments already. Sorry for the first one!
Thanks An: did you read the commentary on the slides. Would those address some of your concerns?
Thanks Michael for the informative presentation! Interesting figures on India – do you know what the key drivers for the increase in milk productivity were?
I think sustainable intensification is the key word one should use. We can also produce more ASF using natural resources (land and water) to produce grains as feed for livestock. Mixed farming system, for instance do not use NR and has a low carbon foot print. Therefore intensification of smallholder mixed farming system can lead to increased availability of ASF and reduce poverty at the same time. But the tradeoff is production of CH4. But this is moderate compared to its multiple contributions from a farming system perspective (In India 85% of milk production is from crop residues but contribution of livestock to overall GHG emission is only 11%). I was wondering what will happen if all grain based livestock production is banned !. Probably livestock products might become very expensive, over consumption of ASF will reduce, food safety of ASF will increase and livestock rearers of low income countries will become rich !!
now that is some "out of the box" thinking....good hypotheses....could they be modelled?
From Addis Dream Team: interesting idea - a global ban on feeding grain to livestock. That would certainly favour developing world producers, would deal with a lot of emission problems etc. Note that we are dreamers.
Some definitions of a dreamer:
dream·er
(drē′mər)
n.
1. One that dreams.
2.
a. A visionary.
b. An idealist.
3. A habitually impractical person.
and some music to go with it... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRhq-yO1KN8 ;-)
I think they belong to the third category of the definitions!
Very informative presentation and some excellent discussion here that helps to refine the issue.
For me there is not a shred of doubt that intensification is the key factor to increase ASF on people's plate. But how the intensification changes the production sytem is a key consideration. This may be more complex of the multiple roles that livestock fulfill for smallholders. Starting from 'improved self-sufficiency' at a local level how do we progress to increase local wealth by trading/exchanging surplus produce. What is the required infrastructure? Important (future) role for stakeholder driven cooperatives? certainly no one-size-fits-all solutions. But if we can agree that intensification is needed, then we can focus our resources on HOW?
Thanks Michael. I see intensification as working partly but not entirely. Your arguments make sense in "intensive systems." But we also have vast areas of fragile landscapes that sustainably provide livestock, and which need to be improved too. In an expanded CRP option, we need to cover these production system types as well.
Much of the intensification in these areas has so far been at the cost of increased environmental risk, ecological scarcity and social disparity. A quick look at pastoral range land experience indicates this. For these areas, we need to think of some form of "green" development. In these places intensification could happen through extensification. By this I mean that we look at returns as being beyond the meat, milk and fish, to include environmental returns. An example of this might be improvement in range land ecosystem, improvements in carbon sequestration and so on. Right now, we do not have universal frameworks for comparing the environmental performance of different livestock systems, and standard approaches to the quantification of natural resource efficiency fail to capture the performance of range land based pastoralism is for instance. In other words, I think we need to define and disaggregate what we mean by benefit and cost when we determine the benefits of intensification. I think the story takes a different twist in different scenarios.
Stuart - repeating my comment just inserted further up in the conversation: In Vietnam we are partnering with Wageningen and local research and development organisations on the 'Nutritious Pond' project (started in late 2014) which aims to optimize semi-intensive, polyculture systems where fish and shrimp feed increasingly on natural feeds/nutrients produced in the pond ecosystem. I.e. intensification through less external feed inputs, relying more on and enhancing existing ecosystem services/functions within a pond.
Would this be an example of what you refer to as 'intensification through extensification'?
Intensification doesn't only work through intensifying the diet; in some extensive systems increasing the off-take would intensify the system. In terms of comparing different systems we should indeed look at different returns (meat, milk, fish, hide, traction, status, ecosystem services, ...). Also the "opportunity cost" should be taken into account --> refer to above discussions on grain vs. grass + where to produce the feed...
Thanks Michael, always good to see your signature in this presentation. :)
I think one thing that is not considered though, and for me it is the by far most important thing, is that people are not rational. You cannot assume that a very nice system you develop will be used in order to increase sustainable production efficiency. Catherine went a little bit down this line already but I would like to stress that we have no processes that give an incentive to a majority of farmers to adopt a rational best practice system. We have to consider that many poor people in the developing world have a medieval world view and mindset. Production efficiency is competing with social norms and pressures, religious believes, traditional believes, sometime limited by the time, nerves, risk and money it takes to change and often not pursued due to the simple fact that you don't want to risk being the one nut who does things differently with some failures at the beginning and your neighbors laughing at you. Tons of ideas have been shown to be suitable to increase the productivity and efficiency of existing systems over night if they were properly adopted. How do we get them adopted? From work with farmers we all know that it takes years of INTENSIVE direct work, trust and partnership building and education, education, education to get things moving only a bit.
So, to cut it short: How do we deliver it and is our old fashioned approach suitable at all? You do not have to promote cars or smartphone, people buy them if they can afford them. How do we make them buy into our ideas?
Good points Tassilo. I think we have a good potential for adoption of technology that will contribute to sustainable intensification with improved animal breeds and forage varieties. At least in agronomic systems improved varieties are generally adopted pretty readily (I think at least 95% of wheat acreage is planted with improved semi-dwarfs at this point). It's fairly easy to switch inputs from one forage crop (or I'd imagine one cattle breed) to another compared to some deeply ingrained cultural practices. One link that is missing for improved forage adoption in Africa at least is seed systems. If we really want to increase our activities in breeding forages for the African market, then it seems essential that we focus on seed production and link with appropriate partners to develop seed distribution systems in the region.
hi Tassilo, nice to 'hear' you! let me follow up on your last point. Napier grass has been widely adopted in East Africa- it's actually the 1st fodder type- but there's been little dissemination (except the new varieties). on the other hand, we've been working DECADES on silage making.. and doesn't it make sense for everyone to do silage??? farmers decision making is rational I believe but we as 'observers' 1. don't have the same info as farmers and 2. we don't use the same metrics (e.g. we believe farmers should maximise profits while they may min risk)... my 2 cents.... so we need to scrutinize our 'best bet' not through our eyes, but the ones of the farmers/ VC actors etc..
Thanks for this presentation and accompanying text. I'd like to offer some thoughts on the nutrition angles here.
The first is that there may be untapped opportunities in exploring approaches that rely at least in part on extensive models of production. From a nutritional perspective these are interesting, as the ultimate product may be more nutrient-rich than those produced using conventional intensive models, by virtue of the more diverse diet consumed by fish. The same might be true for livestock/milk, am not sure. In some settings if we don't test these alternative production models, I don't think others will, and there are opportunities for a lot of potential innovation there, at least in aquaculture. And of course environmental angles as well.
The text also raised the issue of "for the poor" vs. "by the poor". I know this has been discussed before. The way I picture this in my head is that these are concentric circles with some overlap-- probably varying amounts of overlap depending on what value chain we are discussing and depending on context. From a nutritional perspective I'd argue that the "for the poor" is the circle that is of greater importance to focus on and is also the part that we probably have the greatest opportunity to positively benefit the greatest number of people.
Also, how we measure those effects-- particularly among non producers-- is a critical question in need of more discussion. To what extent are we satisfied making the assumption that greater productivity automatically translates to benefits for the poor non-consumers? How often is that assumption tested and what methods do we have to test it? The paper by Ben Belton et al examining the question of whether or not aquaculture is pro-poor is one outstanding example, but are there other approaches that we could use to try to understand this, and ultimately to make a stronger case that our programs positively benefit poor non-producers?
To answer this question intensification should be viewed within the context of sustainability, particularly from a commercial stand point if the production system is over-loaded due to intensification. That system will not deliver revenues to sustain the business. Production will scale back in order to reach a new equilibrium between the carrying capacity of the environment and the financial gain that is required to sustain production. In other words if intensification reached a point of negative return on investment the system will correct its self in favor of sustainable economic gain
The challenge is that the system may require a long time before it can correct its self, looking to the future we should consider intensification and suitability as one issue. Intensification should be coupled with best practices in order to achieve sustainability