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Limited supply of quality feed is the most common problem limiting livestock productivity in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Routine feed evaluation is indispensable for formulating balanced rations, feed characterization, safety, and minimizing the environmental impact of livestock. Traditional wet chemistry has not met this demand in SSA because it is time consuming, expensive, reliant on imported reagents and equipment that requires regular maintenance. Near Infrared Reflectance spectroscopy (NIRS) is a rapid and accurate alternative. NIRS can help meet the need to characterize locally available forages and feeds on the continent, thus allowing formulation of optimally balanced and safe rations, facilitating establishment of nutritive value-based pricing, and improving feed marketing and environmental stewardship. Though several NIRS systems have been purchased in many SSA countries, few are currently used. Reasons include high upfront costs, lack of requisite technical capacity, lack of access to comprehensive wet chemistry-based databases to develop and validate robust and accurate predictive equations, lack of access to or relevance of existing validated equations, and limited awareness about the value of NIRS. Recently developed portable devices can dramatically reduce cost, while providing flexibility and comparable accuracy to benchtop systems. Formation of NIRS consortia and communities of practice including public-private partnerships that link equipment, pool resources, and provide periodic training and troubleshooting, can address many of these problems. This paper elaborates the potential for using NIRS to improve feed analysis in SSA countries, the reasons for the low use of existing systems, and strategies to improve the adoption and use of NIRS.

Evidence-based livestock policies are needed to raise rural incomes and improve dietary diversity in low-income countries where the majority of populations depend on livestock for their livelihoods. Yet these contexts exhibit unique challenges on both information supply and demand sides, which widen the gaps between research and policy-making. This paper reviews the constraints to evidence-based policy-making and identifies knowledge areas most suitable for building a persuasive narrative that capture the attention of busy decision-makers. These promising spaces for production of new data and methods focus on livestock contribution to the economy, trade, food security and resilience. The examples discussed show the potential of current and future research for leveraging synergistic interests from multiple actors and improving livestock policy interventions.

The global increase in the demand for and production of animal-source foods (four-to five-fold increase between 1960 and 2015), which has been mostly concentrated in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), provides smallholder livestock producers with an opportunity for improving their livelihoods and food and nutrition security. However, across livestock production systems in many LMIC, limited supplies and high cost of good quality feed severely constrains exploitation of this opportunity. In many of such countries, feeds and feeding-related issues are often ranked as the primary constraint to livestock production and increased consumption of animal-source foods. Here we review the complex biophysical, socio-economic and technological challenges related to improving quality feed supply and the reasons for generally low adoption of apparently proven feed enhancement technologies. We describe also successful interventions and conclude by recommending strategies for improving quality feed supply in LMIC that account for and overcome the prevailing challenges., Highlights • Livestock production in developing countries is constrained by limited supply of quality feeds. • There are many technologies that can improve supply of quality feed for small holder producers. • Complex set of bio-physical and socio-economic factors limit the adoption of technologies and thus limit the improvement in supply of quality feed. • The failures of adoption of feed improvement technologies result from systemic constraints and inadequate attention to sociocultural and economic factors. • Success is often driven either by market incentives and or an innovative affordable approach that provides solutions to multiple problems.

Ten cereal straws and stovers from India were treated using the ammonia fiber expansion (AFEX) technique to explore the effectiveness of the AFEX technique for releasing sugars from structural carbohydrates and for the upgrading of cereal crop residues as livestock feed. Recovery of glucose and xylose in AFEX treated material was about three times the recovery in untreated material. AFEX treatment increased recovery of glucose between 60 and 85% and of xylose between 50 and 85% of their theoretical yields. AFEX treatment increased average crude protein (CP) by 260% (CP content: 62 vs 161 g/kg). Cell wall content as estimated by NDF decreased on average by 47 g/kg (NDF: 656 vs 609 g/kg) while cellulose contents estimated as ADF apparently increased by 23 g/kg (ADF: 443 vs 466 g/kg). Lignin contents estimated as ADL did not significantly differ between untreated and treated material. Measured after 24 h of incubation, AFEX treatment consistently and significantly increased in vitro gas production (42.9 vs 33.3 ml/200 mg), in vitro apparent digestibility (493 vs 630 g/kg) and true digestibility (624 vs 755 g/kg) and in vitro metabolizable energy content (6.9 vs 8.6 MJ/kg). Treatment changes in digestibility estimated based on in vitro gas production generally agreed with gravimetric estimates based on undigested residues, making it unlikely that the effect of AFEX treatment on digestibility was overestimated by unrecovered soluble but un-fermentable substrate. Increases in CP content and in vitro digestibilities upon AFEX treatment were unrelated to CP content and in vitro organic matter digestibilities (IVOMD) of untreated base material, though increases in IVOMD upon treatment tended (P = 0.07) to be lower in material with high (>530 g/kg) baseline IVOMD.