Ethiopia livestock feeds project tests tools to guide feed interventions

On May 28-29, 2012 the Ethiopian Livestock Feeds Project held a synthesis workshop at ILRI in Addis Ababa. The project team, including the core partners from the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research and the Amhara Regional Agricultural Research Institute, had been working together to refine various tools including FEAST, Techfit and a simple value chain assessment checklist.

The suite of tools is designed to help with developing ideas and plans for feed interventions at local level. The workshop reviewed the results from using the tools in the field and assessed the value of, and ways of improving, the tools.

The results showed that the tools are a rapid way of developing a good overview of farming systems and the constraints to improved feeding. However, generating ideas for feed intervention was more challenging. The tools were helpful in guiding thinking, and in ensuring that suggestions for feed improvement took into account system constraints such as land and labour availability, but the tools were not recipes or blue prints. Rather the process of working with the tools in the field can help to arrive at interventions which are more likely to succeed, especially if the tools are applied by research and development staff working closely together and with their clients, the livestock producers, and the other “actors” in the livestock value chains. This participatory application of the tools should result in the improved targeting of feed-based interventions.

Download this and the other two reports from the six-month ‘Fodder and feed in livestock value chains in Ethiopia – trends and prospects’ project.

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The project was led by ILRI. It was project was funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR); it is part of the CGIAR Research Program on Livestock and Fish.