Underdeveloped feed value chains dominated by artisanal and small-scale producers are also important constraints to feed development in LMIC. Fig. 1 shows a typical LMIC feed value chain with emphasis on the weakest linkages that need development and the strongest ones that need to be enhanced. The feed value chains in LMIC are characterized by: limited capacity to produce feeds and feed ingredients and exploit the production capacity of feed mills; marked seasonal and other fluctuations in ingredient supply and quality ; supply logistics challenges particularly for bulky crop residues; and absence of market incentives for improving quality such that prices are unrelated to quality. Additional factors include absence of vibrant seed systems for forage species; weak governance of the value chain; absence of market information systems; and absence of enabling policies . In many LMIC, quality and safety regulatory institutions also either do not exist or lack the means or authority to incentivize or deploy penalties. Consequently, there is limited awareness among smallholders about the value of feed quality and safety regulation . Yet a well-developed feed value chain with active participation of the private sector is critical for encouraging innovation and adoption of technologies in the feed sub-sector. The aforementioned highlights the fact that development and introduction of feed improvement technologies alone are not enough. Rather, it is critical to also understand the contextual factors that facilitate or hinder their uptake in specific communities . Approaches that recognize and address the multiple and varied objectives of smallholders and the associated trade offs are required for successful implementation of livestock development projects . Holistic understanding of technology adoption by smallholder famers requires a shift from the household characteristics-based understanding of technology adoption to considerations of factors affecting adoption at different aggregation levels including the farm household, value chain,indoor vertical farming institution and national policy .Despite the challenges described above, several introduced feed technologies have improved supply of quality feed and livestock productivity and have been successfully adopted, scaled and some have directly increased incomes .

Examples include brown midrib sorghum in central America , Desho grass in Ethiopia , Brachiaria in Brazil and Kenya , cowpea in West Africa , corn silage production in semi-arid China and Ficus thonninningii trees in northern Ethiopia . Table 3 describes some successful feed improvement technologies in various LMIC and agro-ecologies. Most of the successes did not depend on the nature of technologies per se, but on specific local conditions that facilitated their adoption by farmers . For instance, successful adoption of forage legumes depends on their ability to meet farmers’ needs, building relevant partnerships, understand the socio-economic context and skills of famers and participatory involvement of communities, particularly champions . That success is not based just on the technology is evident because technologies, which have not been adopted in sub-Saharan Africa, e.g. crop residue ammoniation, have been adopted in China and to a lesser extent in India . Technologies such as urea treatment of crop residues work only when they are properly implemented and when adequate resources, infrastructure and technical skills are available for their use in smaller scale production systems. Thus, feed development interventions that succeed are those that focus on technologies that are good fits for the prevailing socio-economic and cultural settings. Consequently, to facilitate adoption, participatory technology development should be coupled with extension efforts that recognize agro-ecological and socio-economic contexts as well as appreciating and incorporating knowledge from various sources, rather than from scientists or researchers alone . Moreover, due to the multifaceted nature of feed challenges in LMIC, feed technologies that deliver multiple benefits are often more successful. An enabling environment that supports and or rewards technology adoption by farmers is also an important prerequisite for success . Further, success has also resulted from adoption of a combination of technologies that result in synergistic improvements in profits such as providing improved feeds to high genetic merit livestock breeds with greater performance potential or improving capacity in feed quality analysis and marketing .

Additional examples are improved forage introduction and silvo pasture in semiarid Ethiopia , which provided simultaneous solutions to different challenges including feed scarcity, land degradation, and lack of fuel wood, or the dual-purpose brown midrib sorghum variety in South America , which provided more digestible stover for animal feed as well as grain for human consumption. Such approaches require proper evaluation of technologies and their fit to given social and agroecological systems from the outset. The Livestock Systems Innovation Lab EQUIP-FEED project follows this package or holistic approach to try to solve thelivestock feed problems in Ethiopia and Burkina Faso . The project has five components across the feed value chain and aims to develop the knowledge, skills, tools and products in the production, processing and utilization of feed towards an eventual increase in the supply of quality feed in Burkina Faso and Ethiopia. The five components aim to implement important solutions across the feed value chain namely.Understanding available feed resources and their challenges.Develop best-bet forage options that are adapted to various agro-ecologies.Develop more accurate nutrient requirement values for local and crossbred animals and develop rations that are better nutritionally and cost wise.Improve the capacity for analysis and quality standardization for feeds to improve commercialization of the feed sector.Demonstrate the synergistic effect of improved feeding, dairy management and breeding on dairy productivity. Growing market oriented urban and peri-urban dairy and fattening systems in towns all over sub Saharan-Africa and South East Asia are also associated with increased demand for feed. As a result, small-scale fodder marketing and growing of high yielding forage cultivars is increasing . While most fodder sellers are small scale producers who produce more feed than they need for their own animals , there is a continuously growing demand for fodder markets from urban and periurban commercial livestock producers .Limited supply of quality feed is the main constraint to development of the livestock sector in many LMIC, and it constrains attainment of food and nutritional security.

Despite the wealth of ‘research-proven’ technologies that can be used to improve feed and hence livestock production in smallholder systems in such countries, only a few success stories exist because of the low level of adoption of the “promising” technologies by the farmers. The failures of adoption of feed improvement technologies result from systemic constraints that make their adoption challenging and from paying inadequate attention to sociocultural and economic norms. Even when technical and resource limitations are addressed, the limited scale of improvement in livestock productivity from some technologies may not adequately incentivize adoption of the technology. Where success stories with widespread adoption of technologies exist, hydroponic vertical farming they are often driven by financial and market incentives and or by simultaneous provision of solutions to different problems while addressing socioeconomic factors. Such examples typically require collaboration between research, extension and financial institutions. Therefore, participatory technology development involving various key stakeholders is a promising approach. While it is important to increase the diversity of potentially appropriate ‘working technologies’ that target specific agro-ecologies and production systems, it is also critical to understand their fit to the specific context and to ensure that the enabling environment exists. The Techfit tool , for example, attempts to match technologies to local conditions considering important context-specific constraints. Such tools help researchers to think through the characteristics of the local system including the prevailing sociocultural and other norms, and thus select those that are most likely to be widely adopted. Feed-related constraints are only a subset of the range of challenges faced by smallholder farmers. Other overriding challenges should be considered such as lack of market access for selling livestock or their products, lack of finances, low genetic merit livestock breeds that inadequately respond to improved feeding, and diseases that limit animal productivity. Therefore, a ‘package approach’ that improves various production aspects and or various components of the value chain is more likely to be successfully adopted. It is also critical to ensure private sector engagement from the outset to ensure sustainability and scaling of the intervention after donor or research funding ends.Finally, given the complexity of the problem of adoption of feed technologies by smallholders, future research in the livestock sector should shift from developing new technologies towards assessing sociocultural and institutional barriers to adoption of technologies and finding innovative ways of bypassing such barriers . This entails a shift from the bio-physical focus to developing alternative institutional arrangements that improve engagement of stakeholders, including farmers, the private sector and strengthening of the value chain .

There is also an urgent need for prioritizing and reforming specific regulations and policies that currently deter or limit private sector investment in small- and medium-sized agribusinesses in the feed value chain. Collectively, these approaches will facilitate adoption of feed technologies, improve livestock productivity and contribute to reducing food and nutrition insecurity problems in LMIC.Copper is toxic to life at levels that vary depending on the organism. Humans are mandated to not exceed 1–2 mg/L copper in their drinking water , while some freshwater animals and plants experience acute toxic effects at concentrations as low as 10 µg/L . Because the human food chain begins with plants, it is critical to understand how plants tolerate heavy metals including copper, which is frequently concentrated in soils as a result of pesticide application, sewage sludge deposition, mining, smeltering, and industrial activities. This issue is also at the crux of applying phytoremediation approaches, which use green plants to decontaminate or contain polluted soils and sediments and to purify waste waters and land fill leachates . Metal-tolerant plants inhibit incorporation of excess metal into photosynthetic tissue by restricting transport across the root endodermis and by storage in the root cortex . In contrast, hyper accumulating plants extract metals from soils and concentrate excess amounts in harvestable parts such as leaves.Cysteine-rich peptides, such as phytochelatins which transport copper to the shoot, increase in response to high cellular levels of Cu , and Cu-S binding occurs in roots and leaves of Larrea tridentata. However, an unidentified copper species, concentrated in electron-dense granules on cell walls and some vacuole membranes, appears to be the main morphological form of copper sequestered in Oryza sativa , Cannabis sativa , Allium sativum , and Astragalus sinicus . Plants take in and exclude elements largely at the soil-root interface within the rhizosphere, i.e. the volume of soil influenced by roots, mycorrhizal fungi, and bacterial communities . Deciphering processes that control the bio-availability of metals in the field is difficult because the rhizosphere is compositionally and structurally complex. Here we report on using synchrotron-based microanalytical and imaging tools to resolve processes by which metal tolerant plants defend themselves against excess cationic copper. We have mapped the distribution of copper in self-standing thin sections of unperturbed soils using micro-Xray fluorescence and identified structural forms of copper at points-of-interest using micro-extended X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction . Because only a few small areas could be analyzed in reasonable times with micro-analyses, the uniqueness of the micro-analytical results was tested by recording the bulk EXAFS spectrum from a sample representing the entire rhizosphere and by simulating this spectrum by linear combination of copper species spectra from POIs. We investigated copper speciation in rhizospheres of Phragmites australisand Iris pseudoacorus, two widespread wetland species with high tolerances to heavy metals .P. australisis frequently used to treat waste waters because it can store heavy metals as weakly soluble or insoluble forms. Its roots can be enriched in Cu 5-60 times relative to leaves, with large differences among ecotypes and between field-grown versus hydroponically grown plants . To take into account natural complexity, including any influence of bacteria, fungi, or climate variation, our experiment was conducted outdoors, rather than in a greenhouse on seedlings using ex-solum pots or hydroponic growth methods. The soil was from the Pierrelaye plain, a 1200 ha truck-farming area about 30 km northwest of Paris, France. From 1899 to 1999, regular irrigation of the Pierrelaye plain with untreated sewage water from Paris caused contamination with heavy metals, mainly Zn, Pb, and Cu .