The CGIAR’s Systemwide Livestock Programme ((Wait, there are still CGIAR systemwide programmes?)) has just announced the release of its latest database, this one on the nutritive value of feeds in Sub-Saharan Africa. You put in the name of some sort of feed, typically a plant species, and you get out data on nutritional composition, often from multiple samples, arranged in a couple of different ways, and downloadable. Nice enough, and very useful, I’m sure, for its target audience. However, at the risk of burnishing to a well-nigh mirror-like finish my reputation as a nay-sayer, I’d have to say that I missed a couple of things. One would be the ability to search on particular nutritional values. Then when a species with the appropriate combination of qualities pops up you could work out if you can grow it in your shamba using another nifty ILRI tool. And the other thing would be some kind of link to genebank accessions. Surely some of the samples analyzed were of material that’s conserved in the ILRI forages genebank? Maybe for ver. 2.0.
Luigi,
Interesting idea. There are various “nifty ILRI tools” in development and I’m not sure that the SSA feeds database is the right one for what you’re suggesting. Last week a group of ILRI scientists and others got together in India to work on some ideas for a tool that would help in deciding which feed technologies would work best in different contexts. Working name is “Techfit” and you can read about it at:
http://fodderadoption.wordpress.com
The key issue is choosing technologies that deal with the major constraints: feed scarcity, feed quality and feed seasonality. And it’s also about much more than nutritive value – there are many other characteristics of feed technologies which will affect their suitability in different contexts. We do envisage a suit of tools to deal with some of these issues and will keep posting progress on the fodder adoption blog.