Approach - Fodder Innovation Project

Approach

Introduction

Introduction

Livestock is important to the livelihoods of poor people in many regions of the developing world. A generic problem found across this diverse range of production and marketing contexts is the shortage of fodder. The reasons for this shortage include: increasing competition and environmental degradation in common property areas, shortages and poor nutritional value of crop residues, and the need to increase animal intake in intensive production systems. This is not a new problem and over the last 40 years or so considerable efforts had been made by the agricultural research community to develop new fodder technologies and to introduce new fodder varieties and feeding systems. While there have been successes, this research and associated efforts to disseminate fodder-related technologies have made limited progress in resolving the fodder scarcity problem.

This is particularly disappointing because maintaining or improving livestock production and marketing could have important social and economic consequences for poor people with livestock-based livelihoods. In addition, upgrading throughout the livestock value chain is needed to survive, cope and compete in dynamic production and market conditions at sub-national, national and global scales.

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), United Nations University (UNU-MERIT), The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) are collaborating on a research project — The Fodder Innovation Project — to explore fodder scarcity from a new perspective. This new perspective involves exploring ways of strengthening the capacity to innovate. In other words the research will re-frame the question of fodder shortage not from the perspective of information and technological scarcity in fodder production, but from that of capacity scarcity in relation to bringing about technical and other changes in fodder practices — this is referred to as fodder innovation. The project understands innovation capacity to be a function of the networks of different players related to livestock fodder and their collective capacity to bring new ideas into use.