Antioquia field sampling
In December 2020, January and February 2021, researchers from the University of Antioquia were able to safely visit four study farms in Antioquia to undertake field sampling, acquire UAV imagery and conduct interviews with the farmers. In the video below, Prof Mario Cerón, Mateo Vargas, and Lady Sepúlveda provide more information about the fieldwork. Some…
Sustainability Science Special Feature
Introduction The sustainable development goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations on 25 September 2015 are currently driving most development policies globally. With 17 goals, 169 targets, and 232 indicators to monitor and track progress, countries may lose sight of the synergies and trade-offs between goals and between targets, a fact that has been acknowledged…
A Critical Resource for Ethical International Partnerships
Drawing on experiences of international, interdisciplinary and cross sector projects the Critical Resource explores the elements of partnership that determine the nature of the practice and outcomes of our research. It seeks to offer some provocations and guidance to those either well practiced or starting out with new partnerships, to help promote the importance of…
Barriers and Strategies to Achieve the GHG Mitigation Goals of the Livestock Sector in Latin America
by Alejandro Ruden, Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT Livestock production is a fundamental source of income and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Latin American countries. 20 percent of the region’s emissions come from agriculture, 70 percent of which comes from livestock (FAO, 2019). There are several management and technology options with enteric methane mitigation…
More Sustainable Beef Production from Silvopasture in Colombia
Dr Jacobo Arango and Prof Jon Moorby Cattle are an important part of many Colombian farmer’s lives, but climate change and the pressures of increased production on land use mean that more sustainable systems of agriculture are urgently needed. As part of the GROW Colombia project we have been investigating the benefits of using new…
Patía Fieldwork – November 2019
by Dr Marcela Ramos – University of Glasgow The social science component of the CoForLife project has been framed as being preoccupied with issues of current farmer practices and collaborative experiences – the role of indigenous knowledge; agency, collaborative learning and skills, as well as questions of farming process and adaptive practices. Three broad questions…
Stakeholder Engagement meeting – Bogotá
by Dr Marcela Ramos – University of Glasgow On 8th November 2019, a stakeholder engagement workshop was held at the Universidad Nacional Colombia in Bogotá. A series of presentations were delivered by project partners to Colombian stakeholders, including the sharing of phase 1 preliminary findings and phase 2 plans. The main topics discussed in the…
Research visit to the University of Glasgow
by Diana María Gutiérrez Zapata, PhD student at the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, University of Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia (adapted from a post in Spanish available here) Between July and October 2019 I did a research internship at the University of Glasgow (UofG) in the United Kingdom. The UofG is one of Scotland’s oldest universities with more…
Patía fieldwork
Between, 17th – 20th September, five researchers and two field technicians from CIAT, University of Glasgow, University of Bristol, and University of Antioquia (Colciencias-funded PhD student Diana Gutierrez) visited Patía in Cauca (~six hour drive from Cali) to meet with smallholder farmers and collect field and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) data at several different farms.…
Francisco José de Caldas
The statue of famous Colombian scientist, botanist and inventor Francisco José de Caldas in Caldas park in his hometown of Popayán. Fitting that we stopped here on our way back from Patía on our BBSRC Newton-Caldas Fund project to visit the University of Cauca.
Patía, Cauca department
Next week, we`ll be visiting smallholder farmers at Patía in Cauca department to carry out mapping exercises, walking interviews and semi-structured interviews to establish current farmers’ practices to assess forage health and productivity; understand how they make pasture-improvement decisions and how much of a concern forage productivity is for them. Attitudes and eventual barriers to…
UAV data acquisitions
At our trial site at CIAT headquarters, we have been acquiring weekly Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) acquisitions and coincident ground measurements over multiple 20m x 20m subplots of Brachiaria humidicola, Brachiaria Mulato and Brachiaria Brizantha Marandu. The slide show below outlines some of the process. We`re combining these observations with satellite acquisitions to develop a…
July visit to CIAT
Between 30th June – 5th July, I visited Cali and CIAT to meet with our CIAT collaborators, update on progress from both the University of Glasgow and University of Bristol and discuss strategies to enhance our sampling at CIAT headquarters and Cauca. My visit coincided with that of Jon Moorby and some of his team from…
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