What are feed baskets data?

Livestock systems sustain more than one billion people worldwide, most of them in low- and middle-income countries, and generate about 40% of the global agricultural output value (World Bank 2021).

Feeding practices are central to livestock system productivity and profitability, making it a relevant topic for a wide range of stakeholders involved in food security and agricultural development. Understanding feeding practices is crucial to livestock system analysis. Diet composition and feeding management define potential nutrient intake and utilization, thereby shaping animal performance, feed-use efficiency, and production costs, as well as enabling the evaluation of alternative feeding strategies.

Feeding practices strongly influence environmental outcomes, particularly, including greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with livestock. Key sources include enteric methane from ruminant livestock and manure-related emissions from both ruminant and mono-gastric livestock, and emissions associated with feed production across all livestock systems. However, limited availability of reliable feed data makes it challenging to estimate environmental impacts and impedes the livestock sector from accessing climate finance and design effective mitigation strategies.

Feed basket data describes both what animals are eating (quantity in kg dry matter (DM) per day) and the nutritional characteristics of feed (energy digestibility, nitrogen content). This information is crucial for various stakeholders, from livestock producers making feeding decisions to national governments developing livestock sector policies to improve sector growth and to reduce environmental externalities. Despite the importance of livestock feed data, the current data landscape does not support effective use of available information, due to critical challenges around data integration, access, and consistency.

While data is frequently collected at the local level to meet immediate needs, it rarely has the documentation or accessibility required for broader use in decision making.

Documenting data with standardized structures and common definitions creates a two-way information flow. This two-way information flow creates an interconnected system where harmonized local data can be aggregated to support broader initiatives like national GHG inventories and regional planning. At the same time, these large-scale analyses can generate critical reference values, benchmarks, and decision-support tools that provide direct feedback to improve local productivity and decision-making. To establish harmonized data systems, feed data should be collected and stored using FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles. Doing so supports an ecosystem that enables data to be used across scales and geographies to improve research, decision-making, and livestock sector productivity.