Farmers in mixed crop-livestock systems produce about half of the world’s food. In small holdings around the world, livestock are reared mostly on grass, browse, and nonfood biomass from maize, millet, rice, and sorghum crops and in their turn supply manure and traction for future crops. Animals act as insurance against hard times and supply farmers with a source of regular income from sales of milk, eggs, and other products.

Research review on sheep and goat production in the humid zone of West Africa, w. respect to animal population, production parameters, reproduction, forage production, supplementary feeding based on agro - industrial byproducts, disease incidence, particularly peste petits ruminants & helminthiasis, housing, and economic aspects of small and large scale production, w. proposals for further research.

Examines the relative merits of milk versus meat production by African pastoralists. Discusses the implications for livestock development policy.

In the Brazilian savanna, there is a risk that soil fertility of pastures declines to a level below that of the native savanna because of low fertilizer application. To evaluate biophysical pasture sustainability we compared regularly fertilized productive pasture (PP), degraded pasture fertilized 13 yr previously (DP), and native savanna (Cerrado, CE) in an on-farm experiment. We determined (i) biomass productivity of the pastures and (ii) nutrient concentrations in Anionic Acrustoxes from three plots under each of CE, DP, and PP.

Soil microbial biomass is considered as an important early indicator of changes that may occur
in the long term with regard to soil fertility and constitutes an important source and sink of nutrients. In
South Africa, rangeland monitoring has mostly focused on assessing changes of aboveground vegetation
in response to land uses effects, but the associated changes at belowground soil level remain a topic of
further research. The aim of this study was to explore soil microbial biomass at three sites under

Bhutan is least developed, mountainous and landlocked country in the eastern Himalayan range with a population of over 600,000. However its population and ecosystems are vulnerable to climate change. Despite a high level of environmental protection and awareness, Bhutan has become a victim of the global impacts of climate change caused by emissions in other countries. There is little historical climate data available in Bhutan; current records date back only to 1994. Consequently, the future climate scenario for Bhutan is uncertain.

Spatially explicit models are becoming increasingly important tools for simulating land-use change. In this study, we formulated and tested models that incorporated spatial correlates of agricultural expansion and used them to predict local- and landscape-scale patterns of agricultural land-use change and its implications in the Maasai-Steppe of Northern Tanzania. We evaluated the relationship between agricultural land-use and its spatial correlates using Multiple Logistic Regression on data derived from satellite imageries for the year 2000.