The sheep and goat populations of Burkina Faso face many challenges – limited feed in the Sahelian north, infestations of deadly trypanosome carrying tsetse flies in the south, and a long dry season in the whole country. The area is home to three breeds of sheep and goats. The Sahelian sheep and goats in the north are large animals, which means they produce more meat and milk, but the north’s harsh terrain does not provide enough feed. The Djallonke, from the greener south, may be smaller, but they have natural resistance to the trypanosome infections. And the Mossi, a cross of the Sahelian and Djallonke, emerged from farmers’ efforts to maintain the size of the northern breed and disease resistance of the southern breed, but their rather indiscriminate crossing only produced mixed results. Now that is changing. A genetic evaluation and characterization, assisted by the Joint FAO/IAEA Division, has given farmers a visual guideline to know which animals to breed. All they have to do is look at the animal, especially its size – and its ears!
Burkina Faso is a West African country with 17.3 million people, the great majority of whom rely on agriculture, mainly livestock rearing. Livestock, which is responsible for 7.5 percent of national GDP, is almost totally in the hands of resource-poor pastoralists and smallholder farmers.
Developing the livestock sector, especially focusing on improving the productivity of sheep and goats, would make a great contribution toward reducing poverty.
A two-level approach has been taken to determine the best way to support the farmers of the area in improving the productivity of their sheep and goats. This includes crossbreeding to capture both the size of the Sahelian and the disease resistance of the Djallonke sheep and goats while also developing a low-cost feeding programme to maintain the animals during Burkina Faso’s long dry season. The Joint Division, working with four national laboratories, set up a programme to improve national capacity to conduct genetic evaluations and, in turn, use increased knowledge of the genetic composition of the breeds to improve productivity. First step called for establishing baseline data on the purebred Sahelian and Djallonke breeds.
To do so, the Joint Division, in part through the IAEA’s technical cooperation programme, provided local technicians with easy-to-use DNA testing kits along with training in sample collection and DNA extraction. As a result, more than 6,000 sheep and 10,000 goats were characterized, of which 123 sheep and 133 goats were genotyped. With this data, the national team from the Institut de l’Environnement et de Recherches Agricoles (INERA) formulated a training module to guide farmers in crossing the two breeds, so they would end up with better producing and trypanosome-resistant sheep and goat crossbreeds.
Of course, following the genetics would be complicated for a smallholder sheep or goat herder to comprehend. So instead of explaining the genetic details, scientists and extension workers just asked the farmers to look at their crossbred animals, especially at their size and their ears. Researchers had discovered that when the animals are the appropriate crosses, they will not only be larger – their ears will be slightly longer than the Djallonke but shorter than the Sahelian. Those larger, medium-eared and well- conditioned animals are therefore the crosses that should be kept and bred.
