Plant-based solutions to integrate livestock disease control, nutrition and environmental sustainability in Africa

小农畜牧业生产对整个非洲农村人口的生计至关重要，但面临许多挑战。气候变化使放牧产生的营养资源更加不可预测，同时增加了寄生虫和其他疾病的威胁。对大多数自给农民来说，投资于更多的投入以避免这些威胁是不可能的，也是不可持续的。迫切需要更好的方式来运行综合动植物系统。为此，该项目寻求在以往成功工作的基础上再接再厉，在以往成功工作中，对一个羊群中的绵羊和山羊个体进行有针对性的治疗，大大提高了健康和生产力，而投入成本比标准的整群治疗低得多。对该系统的进一步改进将是用显示出减少寄生虫负担的植物取代化学驱虫剂，这些植物在当地生长，可以种植或可持续收获。对这类植物的研究显示了一长串候选植物，但在真实的耕作条件下对田间效果的评价非常有限。这些植物还可以通过增加蛋白质的可用性来帮助弥合营养差距，但评估很少考虑抗寄生虫和营养益处，特别是非洲的本土植物。我们将培训农民根据既定的现场指南应用有针对性的选择性抗寄生虫治疗策略，以监测感染对健康的影响，并比较仅使用抗寄生虫药物的畜群和将“生物活性”植物物种纳入其饲养实践的畜群之间的治疗需求以及健康和性能水平。使用植物减少寄生虫负担的一个关键好处是减少感染性寄生虫阶段的环境污染，从而普遍降低感染水平，使所有共享放牧的动物受益。流行病学建模的最新进展，使严格的评估植物使用的这种间接影响的第一次，作为气候和管理的功能，我们建议应用这些模型来评估在当前和未来的气候影响。模型将得到扩展，以考虑在哪里和在什么季节评估的干预措施将是最有用的，以及它们应该如何配置，以最大限度地提高小农生产系统在当前和未来条件下的弹性。最后，健康牲畜对家庭生计的好处可能是巨大的，但对自给农民来说很难衡量，因为提高生产力不一定转化为现金利润，但对粮食和经济安全有微妙的影响。结合田间试验，我们计划使用社会经济访谈来评估牲畜健康和家庭福祉之间的联系。其成果将是一个工具包，用于应用有针对性的治疗方法和营养干预措施，最大限度地利用当地现有的植物资源，为这些系统中以植物为重点的干预措施提供更好的证据基础，衡量研究范围内的生计影响和扩大规模后的潜力，以及预测整个非洲的流行病风险和效益。由于这一项目，将创建工具，用于快速评估和适应整个非洲的疾病和营养威胁，以支持最贫穷地区的可持续生产和粮食安全。

Smallholder livestock production is crucial to the livelihoods of rural populations throughout Africa, but is experiencing many challenges. Climate change is making nutritional resources from grazing more unpredictable, and at the same time increasing threats from parasitic and other diseases. Investing in greater inputs to stave off these threats is out of the question for most subsistence farmers and is unsustainable. Better ways of running integrated animal-plant systems are urgently needed. To that end, this project seeks to build on successful previous work, in which targeted treatment of individual sheep and goats within a herd achieved substantial uplift in health and productivity with much lower input costs than standard whole-herd treatment. Further improvements to the system would be to replace chemical anthelmintics with plants shown to reduce parasite burdens, which grow locally and could be cultivated or sustainably harvested. Research on such plants shows a long list of candidates but evaluation of effects in the field under real farming conditions are very limited. These plants can help bridge the nutrition gap also by increasing protein availability, but assessments have rarely considered antiparasitic and nutritional benefits together, especially with native plants in Africa. We will train farmers to apply targeted selective antiparasitic treatment strategies based on established field guides for monitoring impacts of infection on health, and compare the need for treatment and the health and performance levels between herds using antiparasitic drugs only and those that integrate 'bioactive' plants species into their feeding practices. A key benefit of using plants to reduce parasite burdens is reduction of environmental contamination with infective parasite stages, and therefore general reduction in infection levels, benefitting all animals sharing grazing. Recent advances in epidemiological modelling enable rigorous evaluation of this indirect effect of plant use for the first time, as a function of climate and management, and we propose to apply those models to assess impacts under current and future climates. Models will be extended to consider where and in what seasons the evaluated interventions would be of most use, and how they should be configured to maximise resilience of smallholder production systems under current and future conditions. Finally, benefits of healthier livestock for household livelihoods are potentially immense but are hard to measure for subsistence farmers, in which improved productivity does not necessarily translate into cash profit, but has subtle effects on food and economic security. Integrated into the field trials, we plan to evaluate connections between livestock health and household wellbeing using socio-economic interviews. Outcomes will be a toolkit for application of targeted treatment approaches and nutritional intervention that makes the most of locally available plant resources, an improved evidence base for plant-focused interventions in these systems, measures of livelihood impacts within the study and potential when upscaled, and projections of epidemiological risks and benefits across Africa. As a result of this project, tools will be created for rapid evaluation of and adaptation to disease and nutrition threats throughout Africa, to support sustainable production and food security in the poorest areas.