April 23, 2026 — A dairy cow on a smallholder farm in Ethiopia produces roughly 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of milk per day. In Nepal, a cow produces around 4 kilograms (8.8 pounds). In the United States, that number rises to about 25 kilograms (55.1 pounds). Part of this large gap comes down to feed quality.

Across South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, livestock diets rely heavily on crop residues, like rice straw, wheat straw and maize stover, that are left in the field after harvest. However, these fibrous feeds are difficult for ruminant animals, like cows, buffalo, sheep and goats, to digest. The tough lignocellulose cell-wall in the residue is largely inaccessible to rumen microbes to ferment. This limits how much dietary energy animals can absorb, leading to low milk production and growth in animals mostly fed on crop residues.

Poor digestibility also means that more energy is lost as methane during digestion instead of converted into milk. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, trapping more than 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. As a result, emissions per kilogram of milk in these regions are far higher than a dairy cow in the United States, whose diet consists of grains, soybean meal, high quality hay, and silages.

Simply replacing crop residues with more nutritious forage is not always feasible in smallholder systems, especially in countries like Ethiopia and Nepal, where land, water and labor are limited, and additional forage production can raise emissions from feed processing and land use. Improving crop residues using biochemical technologies or breeding approaches, therefore, offers an important opportunity: It can increase the usable energy animals obtain from feed that is already locally available, supporting both food security and climate goals.

Benefits and Challenges of Crop Residue Improvement

In high-income countries, like the U.S., methane mitigation in livestock production often focuses on feed additives that inhibit methane production. These approaches can deliver climate benefits even with little animal productivity changes. However, many of these additives are either costly or in the research stage. In South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, however, many cattle systems are constrained first by poor-quality feed, so the largest climate gains often come from improving how efficiently animals convert feed into milk and meat.

Meanwhile, crop residues are frequently burned or left unmanaged, contributing to air pollution and soil nutrient losses. By converting the residue material into higher-quality feed, farmers can support higher milk yields, better animal growth and more reliable feed supplies, especially during dry periods when other fodder is scarce. Importantly, this can be done without expanding cropland and use of additional agricultural water, thus avoiding additional emissions from land-use change.

There are three well-demonstrated approaches to improve crop residues and feed: enrichment, which helps animals digest the residues more efficiently, biochemical treatments, which break down the tough fiber structures that limit digestion and dual-purpose crop improvement, which select or breed crop varieties so the residues are naturally more digestible and nutritious.

Yet none of these methods have been meaningfully scaled in smallholder systems.

Crop residues are scattered across farms, seasonal in supply and bulky to transport. Turning them into genuinely higher-quality feed requires inputs, equipment, storage, consistent quality control and a market willing to pay a premium for the feed product. For decades, programs placed most of that operational burden on individual smallholder farmers who lacked the time, knowledge, capital and infrastructure to sustain it. Adoption occurred briefly during project cycles, then stopped. The technology worked in trials, but farmers often faced monetary, technical, and infrastructure barriers.

The assumption that farmers could take on a knowledge-intensive industrial process alongside their usual farming activities has been a major barrier. Because of the disaggregated nature of these trials, farmers rarely understood the economic benefits, thereby failing to sustain their interest. Scaling residue improvement requires shifting the burden of crop residue treatment to enterprises and cooperatives with the capacity to aggregate supply, manage quality, and reach farmers with a product that is accessible, affordable and consistently reliable enough to trust.

Developing a Theory of Change

In November 2023, WRI convened a technical workshop on Crop Residue Improvement for Sustainable Livestock Production, bringing together experts from international research organizations, universities, NGOs and development institutions. It was grounded in WRI's World Resources Report: Creating a Sustainable Food Future, which emphasized the need to reduce pressure on food systems by improving livestock feed pathways.

The workshop aimed to address this challenge from an adoption angle:

Crop residue upgrading is most likely to scale when delivered through enterprise- or cooperative-led feed business models, supported by breeding systems, enabling policies, and credible evidence on productivity and emissions outcomes.

This approach shifts the burden of crop residue treatment from smallholder farmers to businesses with the infrastructure and incentives to deliver it efficiently. A cooperative that processes several tons of straw and sells improved feed bales to local dairy farmers is a more durable model than having each farmer manage their own straw pile.

Our Approach

Following this workshop, WRI and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) jointly developed a proposal in response to the Climate and Clean Air Coalition's (CCAC) open call on Agricultural Transformations. ILRI's long-standing expertise in livestock nutrition, crop residue treatment technologies, and in-country research presence in Ethiopia and Nepal, combined with WRI's systems analysis, modeling, climate mitigation and policy expertise, formed the basis for a co-led implementation model.

This collaboration resulted in the CCAC-funded project (July 2025–June 2027) that is being jointly implemented in Ethiopia and Nepal. The project aims to demonstrate scalable, commercially viable pathways for upgrading low-quality crop residues into higher-value livestock feed, while also strengthening dual-purpose crop breeding to ensure future varieties deliver both grain yield and improved fodder quality.

The project aims to overcome infrastructure and adoption barriers by undertaking five key activities:

1) Partnerships. Scaling depends on institutional buy-in from the start. In Ethiopia and Nepal, ILRI and WRI have established three levels of partnerships. First, we have a direct collaboration with four feed manufacturing operations from both countries. Second, we are actively engaging with ministries of agriculture and the environment, as well as government research institutions. Third, we are keeping all other expert stakeholders informed to facilitate knowledge exchange.   We engage these stakeholders through targeted technical discussions, advisory groups and ongoing consultation to keep them informed of the project's goals.

2) Demonstration pilots. Promising technologies are being tested in partnership with local feed enterprises. Treated residue-based feeds will be produced under real market conditions. The project will support the feed production facilities that will be retrofitted as needed, operators will be trained and market demand will be analyzed.

3) Developing scalable business models. Where previous efforts often asked farmers to treat residues themselves, this project shifts treatment responsibility to enterprises and cooperative-led businesses that can aggregate residues, manage quality and operate at scale. Multiple business models are being analyzed to assess their feasibility and applicability in other agricultural nations. The ultimate economic benefits for farmers will also be quantified.

4) Advocating for “dual-purpose” crop varieties. Plant varieties are not identical — even within the same crop, straw digestibility and fiber composition can vary significantly. Some rice or maize varieties produce residues that animals can digest more efficiently, without sacrificing grain yield. By working with breeders and policymakers to integrate feed traits into crop varietal selection and release systems, the project aims to shift which varieties are promoted and scaled. Improving baseline crop residue quality through genetic approaches can enhance the effects of subsequent biochemical treatments.

5) Quantifying the impacts. Methane reductions, land-use benefits, productivity gains and cost-effectiveness are being modeled using local data and primary data generated through demonstration pilots. Credible evidence supports policy decisions and investment.

Early Progress

Following a kickoff meeting in July 2025, and a partners’ meeting in Ethiopia the following month, the project has been engaging stakeholders and laying the groundwork for implementation in both Ethiopia and Nepal.

The project has established two collaborations with feed manufacturing facilities in Ethiopia and two in Nepal. These partnerships will be used to produce and market improved crop residue-based feed using a technology called biofermentation, while also assessing market demand and providing proof of concept for different business models. Based on these results, the project will identify business approaches that can work across different agricultural production systems. The work also includes capacity building through staff training and support for retrofitting existing feed production facilities to produce crop residue-based feed.

The ILRI Nepal project team also visited India to meet with experts and industries already producing crop residue-based feed. India has achieved some early success in this area, offering practical lessons on how these businesses operate. The visit helped the team better understand the infrastructure, processing upgrades, and added costs required to adopt similar models in Ethiopia and Nepal.

Looking Ahead

 At the end of this month, WRI and ILRI will convene a partners’ meeting in Nepal to assess what it will take to make residue-based feed businesses commercially viable. The meeting will bring together government agencies, researchers, feed manufacturers, cooperatives and financial institutions from Nepal and Ethiopia, along with experts from India and other countries where residue-based feed businesses are emerging. Discussions will examine treatment technologies, dual-purpose crop breeding, enterprise business models and methods for measuring productivity gains and methane reductions. The meeting will be followed by field visits to crop residue markets, feed production units and farms already incorporating residues into livestock diets. Over the course of the week, WRI and ILRI teams will work closely with local partners to assess feed processing facilities, discuss business model design with enterprises and cooperatives, and evaluate the infrastructure needed to produce residue-based feed at scale.

Ultimately, the project aims to demonstrate that improving crop residues can move beyond small trials and become a viable component of livestock feed markets. If enterprise-led models prove successful, farmers could turn an abundant agricultural by-product into higher-quality feed — raising milk production, strengthening rural incomes and food and nutrition security, and reducing methane emissions per unit of milk or meat produced.

Preview image by Filmed by Color Blind/Shutterstock

Explore More:
agriculture food security