Driving better livestock decisions through improved data and analysis
Report back from LD4D meeting, 28-30 November
In November 2018 the Livestock Data for Decisions (LD4D) Community of Practice met in Hanoi, Vietnam, to discuss big questions in the livestock data sphere, assess progress to date on collaborative working groups, and map out next steps.
Meeting documentation
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By Louise Donnison, Karen Smyth and Vanessa Meadu
LD4D members report back from the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture Convention, which took place 3-5 October in Nairobi, Kenya.
How can data-driven approaches improve the sustainability and resilience of food systems? And can these approaches be successfully applied in the livestock sector? In October, members of the LD4D community met in Nairobi to participate in the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture Convention, which brought together agriculture and data scientists from around the world to share their innovative tools and approaches. Due to its unique role in bringing together livestock data producers and users, LD4D also acts as the CGIAR’s Big Data in Agriculture livestock data community of practice. The convention presented plenty of ideas which could offer inspiration to the LD4D community. Read more
by Jeda Palmer and Vanessa Meadu
Small ruminants such as goats are an important source of income for smallholder farmers in South Asia and Sub Saharan Africa. The LiveGAPS project, led by CSIRO (the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) work investigated potential for different intervention packages to increase yields and profitability of goat meat production in Ethiopia and India. The results are published in a new paper, “Closing yield gaps in smallholder goat production systems in Ethiopia and India“. Read more
by Vanessa Meadu
Today, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in collaboration with the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and other partners, releases a new, 10 km global dataset of livestock distributions: the Gridded Livestock of the World, version 3.0 (GLW3), published in Nature Scientific Data.
GLW3 has a reference year of 2010 and includes global distributions of cattle, buffaloes, sheep, goats, horses, pigs, chickens and ducks at a spatial resolution of 5 minutes of arc.
The digital maps in geotiff format are freely available for download via FAO’s Livestock Systems website, which also provides data on production systems and links to resources related to sustainable livestock sector development.
Timothy Robinson, Livestock Policy Officer at the FAO, who co-led GLW3, answers a few questions about this new data.
Q: Why map livestock? Read more
by Gareth Salmon
I recently returned from Berlin, where I attended the first International Conference on Agricultural GHG Emissions and Food Security (#AgriGHG) The agricultural sector contributes significantly to human-induced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and climate change. Responding to this, the conference brought together scientists and stakeholders (policy makers and advisors, farmers’ organisations and the food industry) to discuss the challenges and opportunities for emissions mitigation within the sector. Read more
The LD4D community has released four new factsheets that dig into the data and evidence behind commonly held livestock facts. The latest factsheets investigate claims relating to livestock and climate change, the multiple functions and uses of livestock in Low and Middle Income Countries, the impacts of disease on livestock productivity and the gaps between current and potential yield from livestock. Read more
SEBI researcher Theodora Tsouloufi has been looking into disease diagnosis tools for animal health: what tools are currently available, what are their main offerings, and how these have been put into practice?
One of the ways the Supporting Evidence Based Interventions (SEBI) programme works to deliver ‘better livestock data for better smallholder lives’ is by evaluating already-existent and new technologies. The goal is to gain a better understanding of what tools and technologies work best to improve livestock health and productivity, and under what conditions. Read more
