Improving smallholder dairy and beef profitability by enhancing farm production and value chain management in Pakistan

About the project

The Dairy-Beef project builds on ten years of relationships and investment into capacity and understanding of the smallholder dairy farming system in Pakistan.

This project followed two previous ACIAR projects (LPS/2005/132 & LPS/2010/007), facilitating consistency in terms of key in-country partners as well as scientists from both Australia and Pakistan. This supported continuity in understanding and learning about the livestock farming system, the markets they link to and the extension services that support those smallholder farming households.

This continuity allowed the project to build on an already established and locally tested extension innovation, the whole-family extension approach (WFEA), and ask some big-picture, extension system-level questions. Within this context the Dairy-Beef project aimed to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers through enhanced on-farm efficiency of production and value chain management.

The project focussed on two main research areas:

1. Social inquiry to understand the challenges and benefits of integrating an extension innovation (the WFEA) within collaborating organisations’ extension programs.
2. Investigating opportunities for increasing the returns from smallholder beef systems by mentoring small groups of farmers and linking them with more profitable beef markets.