"Poverty alleviation through livestock production."

Mission:

The basic mission of this endeavor is to alleviate poverty through livestock production.  Through the development and application of innovative agriculture technology, we seek to solve general agricultural output by increasing livestock production worldwide, with an initial in Africa and other developing countries. Pastures and grass-legume pastures and food-crops will be developed to feed livestock and humans. Traditional livestock development efforts have commonly concentrated on the promotion of exotic breeds and crossbreeding as opposed to improving indigenous breeds. This shortcut has bypassed the poor and often caused the disappearance of local breeds.  The opportunity to work with local communities to improve their livelihoods and security through enhancing indigenous breeds, has not been given the attention that is urgently needed. Crossbreeding programs involve capital-intensive interventions in the form of importing the exotic breeds, provisioning  of improved husbandry (e.g. health care, increase in improved and high quality feeds) and technical supervision.  Too often these genuine desires of basic development assistance are dependent on critical foreign donations and credits. However, these resources have rarely been directed to supporting the low-input traditional production systems. Therefore, the opportunity cost of introducing, promoting and supporting crossbreeding programs should be critically re-examined in developing countries. 

Breeding Policy:

Africa, for example, has a large tsetse fly infested belt running right across West Africa through to East Africa and southward to Angola and to Mozambique where only indigenous breeds that are trypano-tolerant can survive. Breeding policies and development programs, therefore must exploit the origins of genotype x environment interactions (the genetic constitution of the breed and its environment) if genetic improvement is to proceed on a rational rather than an ad hoc basis. In the absence of environmental stresses such as heat, worms, ticks, and infectious diseases (the "low" stress environment), growth can be equated to the growth potential. In the presence of environmental stresses (the "medium" and "high" stress environments), growth is no longer directly proportional to growth potential but it is also a function of the level of stress and the resistance of the genotype to the operative stress. In order to increase production efficiency and remain  profitable, it is important to emphasize the management system under which production occurs, and the choice of breeds that are well adapted to both management and physical conditions.

InVictus agriculture services employ a technique whereby we intensively select within the indigenous livestock populations (starting with goats) and use accelerated reproduction, i.e., breeding and kidding three times in two years to multiply the selected population.  This selection and multiplication phase should continue for about six years (3 cycles of accelerated reproduction - where one cycle constitutes 3 breeding and kidding in 2 years).  When sufficient selected indigenous animals are produced, a selected portion of females are used  in terminal crossing schemes with exotic male breeds, where all crossbred offspring is sold to generate income. Prior to selection and accelerated breeding schemes, we engage in intensive pasture development and food crop production so that a portion of the pasture is harvested and saved as hay; and early harvest of food crops (corn) are preserved as silage and saved through the dry season for livestock feeding.