Tradeoffs around crop residue biomass in smallholder crop-livestock systems - What's next?

- Tradeoffs around crop residues use as feed or soil amendment are analysed across smallholder systems.
- In resource-limited systems and environments farmers prioritized livestock feeding over soil amendment.
- Crop residues were mostly added to soil in the productive, input-subsidized systems of South Asia.
- Progress is needed on methods that explicitly analyze cross-scale tradeoffs and interactions.
- Ex-post assessment needed on impacts of systems analysis on the effectiveness of research for development.

Much has been written on the tradeoffs that smallholder farmers face when having to allocate their biomass resources among competing objectives such as feed, fuel, mulch, compost or the market. This paper summarises yet a new body of evidence from 10 studies on tradeoffs in the allocation of cereal crop residue biomass between soil management and livestock feeding in developing regions, published in the special issue of Agricultural Systems 'Biomass use tradeoffs in cereal cropping systems: Lessons and implications from the developing world'. The studies cover a diversity of socio-ecological contexts, farming system types and scales of analysis. We reflect on their main findings and methodological progress, and on the new and not-so-new implications of these findings for research and action in the development agenda. We propose stylised graphical models to portray tradeoffs and plausible trajectories towards synergies, in the hope that such generalisations would prevent further efforts to 'reinvent the wheel' in the realm of tradeoffs analysis. We advocate an ex-post impact assessment of recent investments in systems research to help focus such research further and clearly define its future role in prioritizing and targeting development interventions.