Brachiaria trials at CIAT’s headquarters in Colombia. This improved forage grass has been shown to inhibit nitrification, helping to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture (photo credit: CIAT/Neil Palmer). ‘Much has been written about why eating more red meat could be bad for your health while also harming the environment. But new studies to … Continue reading
The challenge ahead is unequivocal,” says Mario Herrero, senior agro-ecological systems analyst with the International Livestock Research Institute. “We need to feed 9 billion to 10 billion people in the future at a lower economic cost, but also in a socially and economically acceptable way.” Mario Herrero was speaking in Nairobi, Kenya, at a November … Continue reading
Globally, the demand for meat products is growing at 1.8% per year due to increasing populations, economic growth and rapid urbanization. Agropastoral and pastoral systems cover 45% of the earth’s usable surface and supply 9% of global meat production, while mixed crop-livestock farming systems produce 54% of the total meat and 90% of the milk … Continue reading
Illustration, ‘Meat and Methane’, by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com. A recent news feature in Nature Climate Change, Light is cast on a long shadow, notes the warming relations (forgive the pun) between scientists in the livestock and climate change communities. ‘The fields of climate change and livestock research have not always been cosy bedfellows. But they are … Continue reading
Visual capture of livestock talk by Andy Jarvis (CIAT and CCAFS), ‘The Elephant in the Room—Or Is It a Cow?’—to the Inter-Agency Donor Group (IADG) for livestock at the Work Bank in Washington DC, in Apr 2012 (figure credit: CIAT). Andy Jarvis, a senior scientist and biodiversity expert at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture … Continue reading
Ethiopian livestock-keeping family (photo credit: ILRI/Apollo Habtamu). Dan Murphy, a food industry journalist, has published a commentary on a Pork Network website about a livestock chapter in the State of the World 2011: Innovations That Nourish the Planet, published by the Worldwatch Institute, in the USA. ‘The book aims to provide a blueprint for coping with … Continue reading
For the November 2011 ‘liveSTOCK Exchange’ event at ILRI, some senior ILRI staff were provoked to chime in on the need to differentiate research data, results and messages about livestock production systems … Map showing differences in the levels of meat consumed in the world (map by Worldmapper). What set off ILRI’s staff are some … Continue reading
An animated 3-minute video clip by the University of Minnesota’s Institute for the Environment. Justin Gillis has published an interesting piece this week in the Green Blog of the New York Times on a big study just published in Nature by Jon Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. … Continue reading
The November 2010 issue of Advances in Animal Biosciences contains papers from the ‘International Symposium on Sustainable Animal Production in the Tropics: Farming in a Changing World,’ held in Guadeloupe 15-18 November 2010. Five papers are included from ILRI authors: Mario Herrero and Philip K. Thornton: Mixed crop livestock systems in the developing world: present … Continue reading
Soaring international production of livestock could release enough carbon into the atmosphere by 2050 to single-handedly exceed ‘safe’ levels of climate change, says a study. Scientists combined figures for livestock production in 2000 with Food and Agriculture Organization projections for population growth and meat consumption by 2050. They found that the livestock sector’s emissions alone … Continue reading
ILRI Clippings 