SUSTAINABILITY FEED & ADDITIVE MAGAZINE April 2025 81 About Sean Mattson Sean Mattson is the Global Communications Officer for the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, focusing on science communication for Alliance research across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He joined the Alliance in 2018 after working as a science writer, photographer, and scientific diver at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, where he documented the work of hundreds of scientists studying tropical ecosystems. Mattson began his career as a journalist in Mexico in 1999, contributing to several international publications and newswires. He was a Mexico correspondent for the San Antonio Express-News and worked for Reuters as a Central America correspondent in Panama. ing nations often mimic northern nations. “If richer nations begin setting better examples for sustainability, we might just follow suit.” Castro said scientists identified many practical innovations to make livestock systems more sustainable. Current research focuses on the social, institutional, financial, and political factors needed for broader uptake. Key barriers include land-tenure disputes, limited investment, and limited farmer access to credit. “How can we reduce the cost of implementation? It’s expensive,” Castro said. Arango, the Alliance forages lead scientist, outlined additional challenges facing the widespread adoption of grasses that reduce GHG emissions: a lack of technical assistance for farmers, poor links to carbon markets for livestock systems in the Global South, and the sheer size of the areas that could be transformed. “We’re talking about hundreds of millions of hectares,” Arango said. “You can’t change the grasses on all this land overnight.” Even if all these issues were solved – and farmers were ready to widely adopt new grasses and practices tomorrow morning – there just isn’t enough seed. Yet. “The biggest challenge is the amount of seed needed. We have a very high diversity but only in small amounts,” stated Gonzalez, the Alliance’s forage gene bank manager. “We need big companies to invest in doing their own research, or to finance ours, and mass-produce the seeds we have or are developing.”
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