Farmers Welcomed as “Game-Changers” of Agrifood Systems

Jun 19, 2024

Director-General QU Dongyu today welcomed farmers from around the globe to FAO headquarters for the 2024 Annual Meeting of the World Farmers’ Organisation (WFO).

“You are the game changers of agrifood systems,” he said, noting that precisely those systems need to be urgently transformed to address hunger and other global challenges.

Most of the worlds 608 million farms are run by an individual or a family and rely primarily on family labor, operating at a small scale yet producing the vast majority of the world’s food in value terms. Those farmers also fulfil key environmental, social and cultural roles and have a “unique understanding and ability to protect local ecologies, knowledge and heritage,” Qu added.

Qu hailed the WFO as a “great example of effective collaboration” with more than 80 national farmers’ organizations from all over the world under its umbrella. Such organizations can serve a host of functions regarding scale, knowledge sharing and policy change, the Director-General said, emphasizing that effective partnerships are at the core of FAO’s work.

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Video: What Happens When Pigs Adapt to High Soybean Meal Diets? - Gustavo Lima

In this special rerun episode of The Swine Nutrition Blackbelt Podcast, Gustavo Lima, PhD candidate in Animal Science at Iowa State University, discusses how grow-finish pigs respond to high soybean meal diets. He explains the initial drop in feed intake, changes in backfat, later adaptation, energy efficiency, amino acid utilization, and the rise in nitrogen excretion at higher inclusion levels. Listen now on all major platforms!

Click here to read the full research article: https://academic.oup.com/jas/article/...

“Once they got adapted to the diet, they can handle higher levels of inclusion of soybean meal.”

Meet the guest: Gustavo Lima / gustavo-lima-a9867127 is a PhD candidate in Animal Science at Iowa State University whose work focuses on swine nutrition, ingredient characterization, energy metabolism, caloric efficiency, and applied data analysis. With more than 15 years of experience in swine production across Latin America, Gustavo also brings expertise in environmental control, performance evaluation, barn ventilation, and grow-finish housing. Learn more from Gustavo Lima on The Swine Nutrition Blackbelt Podcast, available on all major platforms.