Category: Livestock

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Climate change to devastate crops, promote livestock

[B]y 2050, hotter conditions, coupled with shifting rainfall patterns, could make anywhere from 500,000 to one million square kilometers of marginal African farmland no longer able to support even a subsistence level of food crops. However, the land, on which some 20 to 35 million people currently live, may still support livestock.

Boosting livestock production could be an attractive alternative for millions of poor farmers across Africa who, in the coming decades, could find that climate change has rendered their lands unsuitable for crop cultivation yet still viable for raising animals, according to the study that appears this week in a special edition of the journal Environmental Science and Policy.

That’s from a press release put out by ILRI, the International Livestock Research Institute. The paper is from a special issue of Environmental Science and Policy on Food Security and Environmental Change, Food Security and Environmental Change: Linking Science, Development and Policy for Adaptation. Just skimming the contents gives me the willies.

By the way, Wikipedia says sub-Saharan Africa covers an area of 24.3 million square kilometers. It doesn’t say how much of that supports a subsistence level of food crops. So it is hard to know how much difference this prediction will really make.

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Aurochs alive and well

Well, not quite. But some of their DNA is. A paper just out in PLoS ONE has found two mitochondrial DNA haplogroups (the ones labelled R and P in the diagram below) which apparently got into Italian local breeds from “European aurochsen [haplogroup E] as the result of sporadic interbreeding events with domestic herds grazing in the wild.” Some of these breeds are rare and marginalized, though, so even the last remnants of the aurochs might be in danger.

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Semi-naked chicks go wild on Crete

“Eeyew. What’s wrong with that chicken?”

We were sitting on the shaded verandah of Nico, a lovely man who, after training as an architect in the US, chucked it all in to live off the grid and as sustainably as possible in a converted hovel in the west of Crete. No electricity, no running water, a wild garden and wilder chickens foraging through it.

Naturally I peered at the chicken, and there it was: naked-necked as I live and breathe.

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“Golly, a naked-necked chicken, here on Crete.”

Nico, meanwhile, was answering my friend, and explaining that it was that way naturally and didn’t seem to be any different from the other chickens in his flock.

I waded in with information about the naked-necked chickens of Transylvania and elsewhere, citing the very latest thoughts on the subject, to-whit:

The use of single or combined dominant genes for feather restriction (Na) and feathering structure (F), as well as the sex-linked recessive gene for reduced body size (dw), has been found to be particularly relevant for the tropics (Horst, 1989; Haaren-Kiso et al., 1995). Research into the effects of these genes on economic factors has been undertaken in Malaysia (Khadijah, 1988; Mathur and Horst, 1989). For example, the feather restriction (Na) or Naked Neck gene results in 40 percent less feather coverage overall, with the lower neck appearing almost “naked”. This considerably reduces the need for dietary nutrition to supply protein input for feather production, and protein is a limiting factor in many scavenger feed resource bases. Barua et al., (1998) has reviewed the available information on the performance of indigenous Naked Neck fowl in the hope that it will draw the attention of scientists worldwide to its interesting characteristics and facilitate future research.

I asked Nico whether the naked-necked birds were more efficient egg layers, or suffered less in the heat, but he didn’t know. I said I’d be happy to return to conduct a thorough investigation, but I haven’t had a reply yet.

The photo took some doing too, the birds treating me as an overlarge predator definitely up to no good. Which they should.

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