Three Is Company: Fixing the Grazing-Land Business Conundrum

Grazing-lands have the largest footprint on the world’s land surface area but this is not reflected in the amount of business conducted on them. The most common land use systems are very land intensive, i.e., they use a lot of land to produce not very much and few jobs. The health of the planet depends on having healthy grazing-lands but there is a perfect storm brewing in which the demand from expanding pastoral communities for more food and jobs cannot be met just by applying good grazing-land management practices. Compatible businesses must be found that can create jobs without increasing the pressure on the environment. Fortunately there are many resources found in grazing-lands that could be exploited to create scalable employment-creating industries. However, taking up such opportunities requires big investments. However investments in grazing-land areas have to contend with a lot of uncertainty that is compounded by the need to satisfy three very diverse interested parties: i. Investors in the businesses, ii. Customers for the products of the businesses, and iii. Local communities. Traditional business planning techniques are not suited to coping with so much uncertainty and the consequent need for continuous experimentation in search of elusive pathways to business success. They are also not well suited to facilitating co-creation of businesses by very diverse potential business partners. To address these problems this paper proposes the innovative Lean LaunchPad approach, which was introduced by Steve Blank in 2011 at Stanford University and UC Berkeley to teach founders how to reduce their failure rates through the combination of business model design, customer development and agile development. The key message of this paper is that the divide between large-scale investors and the local grassland communities is an unnecessary and unfortunate barrier to rational and equitable large-scale mutually beneficial, profitable and sustainable investments in grazing-land areas

International R D & E Investment: Revitalising the Skill Base in Grassland Research and Practice

Grasslands make up about 40.5% of the world’s land surface, and almost everywhere they make vital contributions to food supplies, livelihoods, watersheds, conservation of biodiversity and to ameliorating climate change through carbon sequestration. However, grasslands are under-represented in discussions on food security and livelihoods. Despite large investments in building human capacity, improving production systems and in research, grasslands are continuing to degrade and there is no let-up in sight for the consequent strife, famines and conflicts among the pastoral and other communities that depend on them. This review of grassland issues identified many critical skills that are lacking but it also revealed models of public–private partnerships involving educators, entrepreneurs and researchers that could, by enabling the parties to work together, revitalise the skill base in grassland research and practice

An introduction to the subhumid zone of West Africa and the ILCA Subhumid Zone Programme

Overview of the present status & potential for development of livestock production in the subhumid zone of West Africa and, particularly Nigeria. Describes objectives and major components of livestock systems research, an approach utilized by ILCA's Subhumid Programme, to overcome constraints of livestock production in the zone

The expected impact and future of the ILCA Subhumid Zone Programme

Discusses potential impacts of ILCA's subhumid zone programme in Nigeria in terms of the direct benefits accruing to producers from adopting its intervention packages and indirect spinoffs from a better basis for research & development strategies in the livestock sector arising from a better understanding of complex sociological cultural, economic, ecological, agronomic & livestock management interactions constituting the livestock production system gleaned from livestock system research. Suggests 9 priority items for future research with an emphasis on component research & intervention testing

Realising the Potential of Youth in the Development of Sustainable Grasslands

The declining interest of youth worldwide to remain in rural areas and pursue careers in agriculture and grasslands is a threat to all human welfare. Ways and means must be found to redress the decreasing interest of youths in grassland development. Ironically there is a lot of untapped potential for rewarding careers but the youths do not have the skills needed to exploit it. This cannot be corrected by providing occasional and piecemeal training opportunities. The perilous consequences of allowing the rangelands to degenerate are sufficiently serious to warrant a comprehensive approach to developing the wide range of skills needed for grassland communities to be interested and committed to sustainable development

Interactions between agronomy and economics in forage legume research

Highlights the interactions between agronomy and economics in developing forage production techniques for the two main land-use situations in the subhumid zone of Nigeria, viz, cultivation and fallow. Presents break-even sorghum grain-stylo price ratios for different undersowing times, capital and recurrent costs of a 4-ha fodder bank with metal fencing, and costs of obtaining crude protein from a 4-ha fodder bank and from cotton-seed cake. Summarises effect of dry-season supplementation on the productivity of Bunaji cattle under traditional management and the economic returns on fodder banks over 10 years. Presents crop-forage planting patterns used

A rapid survey of feeding regimes for draught cattle in Niger state, Nigeria

Reports results of a survey on feeding regimes for draught cattle in Niger state, Nigeria. presents data on dry-season feeds, and crude protein content of different feeds

Network of the Day: Aggregating and Visualizing Entity Networks from Online Sources

This software demonstration paper presents a project on the interactive visualization of social media data. The data presentation fuses German Twitter data and a social relation network extracted from German online news. Such fusion allows for comparative analysis of the two types of media. Our system will additionally enable users to explore relationships between named entities, and to investigate events as they develop over time. Cooperative tagging of relationships is enabled through the active involvement of users. The system is available online for a broad user audience

Novel approaches to tuberculosis vaccine development

Tuberculosis (TB) remains the deadliest infectious disease. The widely used bacille Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccine offers only limited protection against TB. New vaccine candidates for TB include subunit vaccines and inactivated whole-cell vaccines, as well as live mycobacterial vaccines. Current developments in TB vaccines are summarized in this review