Adopting higher-yielding dairy cattle breeds and improving feed would allow Tanzania to increase milk production while lowering greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and increasing farm incomes, a new study published in Nature Food reveals.

Tanzania has the second largest dairy herd in East Africa with 28 million cows. However, its dairy sector is not well developed. Production is based on small-scale farms stocked with low-yielding breeds and using poor-quality feeds. Combined with other supply chain constraints for handling and refrigeration, this results in low productivity. As a result, Tanzania imports about $20 million of processed dairy products each year.

This study shows that two key targets of Tanzanian government policy ― becoming self-sufficient in milk and cutting GHG emissions by a third ― can be achieved simultaneously, while increasing income in farming communities. Tanzania’s local cattle breed cope well with higher temperatures and disease challenges but produce relatively little milk. Local cattle crossed with dairy breeds can produce three times as much milk when feed is available, while still coping well with higher temperatures.

“This is an important contribution by an interdisciplinary team to identify strategies that simultaneously improve national food availability, increase dairy farmer incomes and reduce environmental impacts,” says Chuck Nicholson, a UW–Madison agricultural economist funded by the Dairy Innovation Hub who made contributions to the quantitative analysis drawing upon experience working with Tanzania’s dairy industry.

The study builds on the Tanzanian Dairy Development Roadmap (DDR), a government plan developed with industry stakeholders, that aims to achieve dairy self-sufficiency by 2030. Currently, Tanzania imports about $20 million of dairy products per year, and the DDR envisions reducing imports through increases in domestic production. The researchers model how the Roadmap could be achieved through adoption of crossbred cattle and providing more nutrients from locally-produced feed. Crucially, it assumes land that is already used in agriculture, mainly local pasture, is converted to grow feed crops, so farmers do not rely on imported feed and no additional forest needs to be cleared to grow it. 

“The idea was to model the Tanzanian Government’s planned interventions to increase milk production and also their targets for improved dairy breeds and feeding practices,” says James Hawkins, an environmental economist from the Lancaster Environment Centre and lead author of the study. “What is very important is understanding the interactions between cattle management and productivity because the carbon footprint is strongly related to the productivity of dairy cows.”

The combination of more nutritious feed and more productive cattle means that production could be increased with fewer cows and less land. Better feed can increase the milk yield for local cows by up to 179 percent and for the higher yielding crossbreds by up to 130 percent.

The study modeled a series of scenarios with different levels of milk production and adoption of new breeds and feeds. All the scenarios showed increases in production and a decrease in GHG emissions. The analysis showed that fulfilling the DDR targets for adopting improved breeds would enable Tanzania to meet 70 percent of the target milk production level, while also fulfilling the country’s ambition to reduce GHG emissions from dairy by a third. The main driver of emissions reductions was avoided land use change. Whereas the modeling showed improving feed requires more cropland, a much larger decline in grasslands would reduce carbon dioxide emissions from forest clearance. 

“This is a win-win-win for Tanzania,” says Mariana Rufino, a professor from the Lancaster Environment Centre and principal investigator in the study. “Many studies have shown how to mitigate emissions from the livestock sector but that tell low-income countries they shouldn’t have livestock. This study is special because we take Tanzania’s own ambitions, a country-level target, and work out how they can achieve it.”

“Dairy is very good for poor communities,” adds Rufino, who has been researching dairy production in Africa for almost twenty years. “It generates daily cash, instead of farmers having to wait for a crop to be harvested once a year. There is a market for feed and lots of small businesses develop around dairy, so it generates income and can reduce poverty. Drinking milk can make a big difference to children in poor communities, providing a little bit of protein and concentrated micronutrients, which they cannot get in other foods. So dairy can have a very important societal impact.”

The income benefits are not equally distributed, the study shows, with falling incomes for farmers who do not have the resources to invest in, feed and care for higher-yielding cattle. Increasing production can lower the farm price of milk, but support policies could create safeguards to mitigate this impact, the researchers say.

Amos Omore, Tanzania country representative for the International Livestock Research Institute, says, “The findings of this paper have huge implications. The same quantity of milk being produced in smallholder dairy farms that dominate in eastern Africa can easily be produced with less than a quarter the number of animals currently, given the large yield gaps. What is required is more investment in sustainable animal productivity in smallholder farms ― a clear win-win for better lives and greener planet.”

The findings are outlined in the paper ‘High yield dairy cattle breeds improve farmer incomes, curtail greenhouse gas emissions and reduce dairy import dependency in Tanzania.’

The research team includes investigators from the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), both in Kenya, the University of Reading, Queensland and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.