Get to know some of our staff and their work at the Global Academy of Agriculture & Food Systems. HTML Transcript: My name is Alan Duncan and I'm visiting professor of tropical livestock production at the global academy. So I spent many years working in the UK on livestock nutrition issues but for the last 10, 12 years I've been completely focused on nutrition of livestock kept by poor smallholder farmers in low-income countries, so across Africa, South Asia, South-east Asia, and I came to realize that many of the issues around improved livestock feeding are not necessarily around technical knowledge but are around uptake of new feed solutions and what limits uptake. So if we think about Ethiopia which is the country I know best then the average yield of a dairy cow would be a liter and a half per day and it's very easy with simple feed solutions to double that yield. Improving the feeding of livestock means the kind of ratio between livestock output, the amount of meat and milk produced, to the feed used is improved and that can reduce emissions, it can reduce water use, it can reduce over-grazing, so the whole range of benefits at the livelihood level, at the family nutrition level and at the environmental level from improved feeding of livestock. I've always been involved in science so that's been my career all through but I've got a strong personal interest in international development and so in 2007 I was able to combine those two things, my strong kind of personal interest in international development with my kind of career in livestock science when I moved to Ethiopia and I spent eight years in Ethiopia working, doing research around improved livestock nutrition, so that was able to combine my professional life with my personal interests. So in Ethiopia for example there are 12 million family farms so that's 12 million smallholder farmers, so we have a massive kind of client base and doing things which can reach large numbers of people, we talk about scaling and that's a real challenge, so how can we as a small group of researchers do research which is relevant and usable to large numbers of the smallholder farmers. One of the things I really enjoy about my work is the kind of collaboration across countries so I enjoy the kind of cross-cultural thing, mixing with colleagues from all over the world, I also enjoy kind of mentoring students and seeing them develop and grow into positions of responsibility and influence and I like the kind of purpose of my work so I think I like the fact that some of the things that I do can really have strong benefits for poor people.
