Participatory Research for Smallholder Livestock Systems: Applying Common Sense to Complex Problems

Key Points: 1. Participatory approaches to research (PAR) bring researchers closer to farmers, the intended users of research outputs. 2. Active, functional participation of farmers in the evaluation and development of new technologies requires researchers to make an important commitment: respecting the knowledge, skills and opinions of farmers while maintaining confidence in their own scientific knowledge. 3. Farmer experimentation is not usually suitable to provide quantitative biophysical data (this can be achieved more effectively in researcher controlled experiments), but to provide qualitative information and improve understanding. This type of information can be collected systematically to enable rigorous analysis. 4. While participatory approaches are likely to lose some of their current ‘favoured status’, the principles of farmer participation will remain an essential component of agricultural research

Integrating forage technologies on smallholder farms in the upland tropics

In the past, adoption of forage technologies has been poor. This paper considers the reasons for this low level of adoption and how the situation has changed in recent years. Experiences, mostly in south-east Asia and some in east Africa, have shown that participatory approaches in the development of technology are the key to integration of forages into smallholder upland farming systems. This paper describes how projects went through the formal and informal stages of forage evaluation. Several key characteristics of communities were identified that determined whether forages could have an impact. A participatory approach was developed, which enhanced both forage technology development and its scaling-out to new areas. Some important data were generated on the environmental adaptation of forage varieties. A model for scaling-out forage technologies was developed. There are several stages of forage adoption, in which grass and legume species play different roles. Challenges for the future are to strengthen participatory approaches in the development of technology, especially in the process of scaling-out such developments

Assessment of cattle marketing in Ea Kar district, Daklak, Vietnam in 2008

This paper describes and discusses the results of a Cattle Market Study conducted in Ea Kar district, Daklak province of Vietnam in 2008. Since 2000, CIAT, TNU and NIAH, in partnership with the Ea Kar Extension Service and District Government, have worked in Ea Kar to introduce the concept of cultivating forage grasses and legumes on farmers’ land for improved smallholder beef cattle production. By 2007, more than 2400 smallholder farmers had adopted cultivated forages to feed to their animals. This new feed resource has enabled farmers to change their cattle production system. They have intensified their production systems from grazing to pen-fed cattle using planted forages as the main feed for fattening, and by changing from local breeds to raising Laisind and cross-bred cattle