Advancing sustainable forage-based livestock production systems in Colombia (CoForLife)

This project aims to improve cattle productivity on Colombian pasture-based farms by using a multidisciplinary approach that will link forage productivity and quality to animal productivity and farmer attitudes and practice. It will use a combination of remote sensing of forage production and animal behaviour together with measurements of nutrient utilisation and system losses to determine ways of improving the efficiency of animal growth and help reduce the environmental burden of cattle production.

This collaborative project brings together a range of expertise from the UK and Colombia to address ways to increase the uptake of improved forage crops for dairy and beef production. Remote sensing (using drones and satellite data) will be used to assess plant growth and nutritional composition, providing spatially explicit data on when, where, and how nutritious the forages are. This will be combined with new ensiling techniques to conserve forages at times of good growth for use in times of low feed availability (i.e. the dry season). Animal behaviour and digestive physiology will be monitored on farms to determine cattle use of feed resources in relation to their growth characteristics and linked to the remote sensing data. Improved efficiency of use of captured carbon and nitrogen for productive purposes is balanced with potential pollutant outputs, and the fate of excreted nitrogen in soils will be determined to investigate the effects of forage plants on efficiency of nitrogen recycling (and losses) from the production system. The economics of the use of novel forage resources will be modelled to investigate the potential benefits to farmers of planting new grazing pastures, and to help them take investment decisions under changing climate conditions. Farmer behaviours in the use of improved forage resources and methods on their farms will be studied to analyse their motivations and potential barriers to the implementation of more efficient farming practices. Engagement with farming communities is an important element of this work, because their knowledge and understanding is vital to successful design, implementation and dissemination of the project work and outputs.

The primary direct beneficiary of this research will be Colombian cattle farmers, but cattle farmers in other Latin American will also potentially benefit in the longer term. Improving farm plant diversity, forage crop growth and nutritional composition, enabling better cattle diets in greater quantities will help improve the nutrition of the farmers' households and their animals. Use of more resilient forages, which have better agronomic characteristics than commonly used varieties, will help reduce crop failure risk and will help improve feed resources by providing crops for conservation for use in times of poor crop growth. The targeted incorporation of forages in agricultural landscapes also has the potential to avoid land degradation/restore degraded land, and thereby ensure long-term agricultural sustainability.

However, there are many barriers to the uptake and use of new forages on smallholder farms, many of which are complex and multi-faceted. Farmer motivations change, and therefore it is essential that there is ongoing improvement in the understanding of the key choices made by farmers. Project results will be useful to farm advice and support networks working towards reducing poverty in smallholder communities, by offering new perspectives and providing vital information on benefits of, and barriers to, technology uptake to enable new approaches to their implementation. Remote sensing of crop biomass and composition, and modelling of farm economics, both offer the potential to help farmers make decisions about their farm. Women in particular are a major component of smallholder farm labour, and yet are frequently left out of the decision-making processes; an important aspect of this project is the use of gender-inclusive participatory processes.

The academic community will benefit from increased understanding of forage crop availability and use of forage resources by growing animals on small-to-medium sized Colombian cattle farms. Novel information will be generated on changes in plant nutrient use efficiencies following changes in soil management practices. New data on the biological nitrification inhibition potential of plants such as Brachiaria will be produced, indicating the potential contribution of crop and livestock farming to climate change mitigation through reductions in nitrous oxide emissions from excreted nitrogen. Project information will be presented at local and international scientific research conferences to ensure appropriate scrutiny and as wide dissemination to the international academic community as possible. We intend to make the original data available open access as a resource for future researchers after the lifetime of this project, to maximise its future value.