ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Agricultural and Food Economics
Volume 9 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2025.1585410
Appetite for forages? The adoption and multidimensional impacts of improved forage grasses in Uganda
Provisionally accepted
- 1Evaluation Consultant, Köln, Germany
- 2Human Sciences Research Council, Pretoria, South Africa
- 3Wageningen Economic Research, Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, Netherlands
- 4Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
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Smallholder dairy farming has the potential to contribute to multiple sustainable development goals (SDGs) through income and employment generation, as well as food security, nutrition, and health. A key constraint to increasing dairy productivity is the availability of high-quality and nutritious feed. Improved forage grasses (IFGs) offer high potential for addressing these feed shortages, and have been proposed as an important lever towards sustainable intensification of livestock production systems. However, few studies have comprehensively and rigorously assessed the multidimensional impacts of IFGs at the farm household level. This study fills this knowledge gap by applying a mixed-methods approach, to analyze the determinants of adoption and impacts of feeding IFGs on productivity, incomes, food security and land management practices. We select the case of Uganda where several IFGs were introduced and disseminated through two livestock development projects. Our findings suggest that lack of experience cultivating forage grasses, reliance on local breeds, not practicing zerograzing, and missing membership in producer organizations are important barriers to adoption of IFGs. We address selection bias through inverse probability weighted regression adjustment (IPWRA) to estimate the impacts of feeding IFGs to dairy cows. Our results demonstrate a positive impact on milk productivity, incomes, and partly on food security. Feeding IFGs significantly increases daily milk yield per cow by 13% and household income by 18%, and the number of food items consumed by 0.9. Our findings can guide the future design and implementation of smallholder dairy development programs.
Keywords: improved forage grasses, Adoption, Income, Food security, Dairy productivity, Smallholder dairy farming, Uganda
Received: 28 Feb 2025; Accepted: 19 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Herforth, Tirivanhu, Ewell, Miethbauer and Nawrotzki. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Nico Herforth, Evaluation Consultant, Köln, Germany
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