Thursday Links

A biweekly round-up of recent articles, blog postings and tweets about livestock, aid and other topics that may be of interest to ILRI staff, by David Aronson.

‘It is burping, not farting’, says ILRI’s Klaus Butterbach-Bahl, setting the record straight about how cows produce methane and impact the environment on All Things Considered, the National Public Radio’s flagship news broadcast. The story focused on how ILRI’s Mazingira scientists are experimenting with different types of feed to reduce African livestock’s environmental footprint.

ILRI’s John Goopy writes for ScienceTrends.com about how Mazingira has developed a different approach to measuring enteric methane (CH4)emissions and discusses implications of the preliminary results.

‘No one lives in Kansas anymore.’ A sobering look at how automation in US farming is killing off farming communities: Farms are simply becoming too efficient to support rural townships.

World Milk Day is tomorrow, and just in time comes this fascinating review of humanity’s relationship to cow milk. Did you know that Chicago passed the first law making pasteurization of milk a legal requirement—in 1908?

I’m old enough to remember when eggs were all but verboten—all that cholesterol, supposedly. Now BBC News reports eating one or two eggs a day is fine: ‘Most doctors encourage the eating of eggs as part of a healthy diet, as they are one of nature’s most nutritionally dense foods—containing high levels of protein; Vitamins A, D, B and B12; as well as lutein and zeaxanthin.”

Is ‘clean meat’ in our future—and if so, who should regulate it? A nice article in Quartz unpacks the regulatory turf battles emerging over lab-produced meat.

‘Suspected Fulani herdsmen’ are being blamed for episodic killings in northern Nigeria—but is Nigeria doing enough to mediate the disputes and invest in more productive agricultural patterns, which might reduce the violence? Sahara Reporters investigates.

How many times have you seen a sentence that begins: ‘What Africa needs is . . .’? This article by a South African researcher makes the case that it needs a million more science PhDs.

From tracking cattle to bespoke weather forecasts, AI technology is helping smallholders across Asia and Africa. But will artificial intelligence really be the game changer its boosters predict?

The notion that Tanzania has abundant unused land has been used to attract investors, including an international consortium called the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. But with tensions rising over resources, farmers, pastoralists and experts beg to differ.

Millions in South Sudan face acute malnutrition, the New York Times reports.

New research suggests the personalities of farm animals should be considered for the improvement of mammalian animal housing, management, breeding and welfare.

Do women’s lives really improve when rural households adopt new agricultural technology? New research from Ghana, Ethiopia and Tanzania.

Tanzania’s National Bureau of Statistics reports that the country’s cattle population increased to 30.5 million cows in 2016/17 compared with 25.8 million recorded in the previous financial year.

How can digital tools be used to expand agricultural insurance? A review of a new guidebook from USAID.

Blockchain—the technology behind so-called crypto-currencies—is being used in the early disruption of Kenya’s agribusiness. One use: To establish credit ratings that enable small-scale entrepreneurs to access the financial system, including micro-loans.

Do international donors focus too much on results, on ‘value-for-money’,—in short, on those things that can be measured? The LSE reviews a book that argues that the discourse on aid has ‘become reductive to the point of self-harm’.

Finally, the Economist reviews a new book by Harvard biologist Edmund Wilson, who argues that the source of human creativity arose on the African savannah:

Man’s ancestors were, for a time, dull, relatively asocial vegetarians. The crucial step, Mr Wilson argues, came with the switch to eating meat. This meant having to hunt in groups, and that meant becoming more social: people had to co-operate in the foray, and share the rewards. This change put an evolutionary premium on communication and social intelligence. Eventually, by way of natural selection, it gave rise to symbolic language. And thus the birth of the humanities came about, in storytelling and the ‘nocturnal firelight of the earliest human encampments’.