Browsing: Cattle

• Tanzania, a country with a total area of 947,300 km², is home to Africa’s second-largest cattle herd.
• Meat exports constitute about 7.1 percent of the East African country’s GDP.
• With eyes on higher revenues, Tanzania aims to produce 10,000 tonnes of meat annually by 2025.

With a big herd and stakes high in the international food markets, Tanzania has set her eyes on ambitious plan of shipping 10,000 tonnes of meat exports annually by 2025. Whereas Tanzania is home to Africa’s second-largest cattle herd, the country has been punching below its weight.

Currently, Tanzania is not one of the top meat and milk producers in the continent. The country’s situation syncs with FAO’s observation that there is no correlation between the size of cattle herds a country owns to its beef exports.

Relation between cattle herds and meat exports

In terms of the size of livestock in Africa, the Food …

No continent suffers worse food security issues than Africa, yet despite the high productivity coupled with disease and drought resistant capabilities of genetic modified organisms (GMOs), Africa has long been resistant to genetically modified food, be they crop or animal embryos.

While the average beef cattle in Africa, say the local Zebu weighs an average weight of a mere 250kg market weight, hybrid beef cattle like the Aryshire, weighs an average of 400kg, almost double the local African breed.

Instead of settling for 1 to 3 litres of milk per day from your local Zebu, you could get in excess of 10 litres of milk everyday from a hybrid Fresian, almost four times more milk.

Not only does the Aryshire beef bull and the Fresian cow produce more, they grow faster and when crossbred, they are even resistant to disease and bad weather. So why would food troubled Africa resist …

At Kapiti research station, 70 Km south of Nairobi, scientists based at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and its Mazingira Centre – a-state-of-the-art environmental and education facility in East Africa is conducting essential climate observations. Collecting actual data on how the climate is changing in Kenya’s Savannahs has remained a challenge. Thus, the data available to show climate variations in East Africa has always needed validation.

The most commonly used method is use of satellite imagery which unfortunately lacks the ability to show actual data for a specific area spanning a couple of kilometers. This data captured by satellite, especially land surface temperature and greenhouse gas emissions might have a certain level of difference with that observed on the ground, commonly referred to as variance. Further, the use of satellite imagery and simulations are often not calibrated to the region where they are applied to and thus have an …