RCUK-CIAT Newton Fund - Towards climate-smart forage-based diets for Colombian livestock

This project will investigate the use of tropical grasses and legumes for feeding to ruminant livestock in Colombia, to improve productivity and reduce the environmental impact of livestock farming by helping to develop more efficient grazed cattle diets. Approximately 75% of livestock producers in Colombia are small family farmers (smallholders), who are generally within the poorest sector of the population. Agriculture contributes 6% of the GDP of Colombia, but contributes approximately 25% of the country's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, 47% of these from nitrous oxide emissions from soils and 48% as methane from enteric fermentation.

Ruminant livestock, which are a critical resource for smallholders, producing highly nutritious meat and milk for the human population, but also contribute to the emissions of polluting GHG. Colombia is a signatory to the Paris Agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and therefore has a commitment to contribute towards the reduction of its GHG emissions. In May 2017 Colombia initiated its national climate change adaptation plan and data from this project will help ensure effective actions take place at national and regional scales. Colombia currently uses IPCC default emission factors for calculating its national agriculture GHG inventory, and this project will generate data for development of country-specific EFs for more accurate (Tier 2) reporting.

This project will generate information, using a range of lab and field-based studies in the UK and Colombia, that will directly benefit Colombian cattle farmers by demonstrating the potential use of improved forage crops and improved forage-based diets for beef production. Forages are the cheapest source of feed for livestock, and improved forage species and varieties improve production rates. This will increase economic returns for the farmer, and will help to improve the resilience of the farming system - beef production systems that grow and finish cattle quickly will be less susceptible to the increasingly prolonged droughts that are afflicting parts of the country. Identification of Colombian-specific ruminant animal feed resources will enable more efficient diets to be used by livestock farmers, thereby reducing emissions intensities and increasing the farmers' economic and physical wellbeing.

We will sample a range of tropical forages from plots maintained by CIAT at its headquarters in Cali, and at other locations in different geographical regions of Colombia. These samples will be analysed by IBERS using lab analyses to determine mixtures that potentially improve cattle growth rate and minimise methane emissions. Promising diet combinations determined this way will then be grown in at CIAT and offered to cattle to measure feed intake and emissions of methane and nitrogenous outputs in excreta. Nutritional modelling, and consequential life cycle assessment at Bangor University, will use collected data to upscale and estimate the consequences of changing cattle diets in Colombia on downstream environmental impacts.

This project will directly address the effects of forage-based diets on methane emissions, with the objective of reducing the emissions intensity of ruminant-based meat production in Colombia. The use of forages and food crop residues for feeding livestock (as opposed to the use of cereals) enables the conversion of human-inedible feed into highly nutritious human edible food, but a by-product of this process is methane. Although the methane emissions from Colombia are low compared to the higher production levels of many more developed countries, its signing of the UNFCCC Paris Agreement highlights its willingness to act to reduce the increase in average global temperatures, and this project will help it to do this. Improvements in livestock nutrition will not only reduce emissions intensities, but also help increase the economic and social well-being of livestock farmers at a range of scales, from smallholders to ranchers, as animals grow faster and produce better returns on investment. Outputs of this research will be disseminated to farmers through CIAT's extension activities in collaboration with organizations such as FEDEGAN (Colombian federation of livestock producers) and Corpoica , and through activities of the Colombian Beef Round Table on sustainable livestock production. Outputs of this work will also be scaled through CIAT's linkages with the private sector.

Academic outputs will include new information on the emissions of methane from livestock fed new forages and locally-available feed resources combined into diets designed to optimize productivity and reduce emissions intensities. Novel scientific information will be published in the peer-reviewed literature (open access). Methane emission data will contribute to the development of country-specific emission factors for use in national GHG inventory calculations. Information on potential changes in forage composition will help indicate the targets for future plant breeding programmes, to make available novel forage cultivars that will thrive in a range of changing environments. The information will also be presented at local and international scientific research conferences to ensure appropriate scrutiny and as wide dissemination to the international academic community as possible.