Experiences from the Implementation of Community-Based Goat Breeding Programs in Malawi and Uganda: A Potential Approach for Conservation and Improvement of Indigenous Small Ruminants in Smallholder Farms

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a well-written and interesting manuscript; however, from the title, one would expect more discussion on the experiences in Malawi and Uganda, instead this is essentially a general concept paper. Including more specific details of the CBBP’s would improve the manuscript.

No description/characterization of the local goat breeds (Malawi and Uganda) used in the CBBP’s nor were there descriptions of the traits under selection. These are serious deficiencies in this manuscript.

The addition of GPS/GIS data would have enhanced this manuscript. A “hotspot” analysis could have revealed if there is a locale within the SBG that was contributing greatly to the CBBP. Are only a handful of breeders contributing elite bucks? Is there an impending problem with inbreeding?

One of the issues with SBG or buck circles is biosecurity. What preventative measures were taken to ensure that diseases were not spread from one household to the next? Nearly two decades ago, Norwegian authorities restricted the use of buck circles for biosecurity reasons. See: H. Paulenz, K. Soltun, T. Ådnøy, K. Andersen Berg, L. Söderquist. 2005. Effect of different extenders on sperm viability of buck semen stored at room temperature. Small Ruminant Research, Volume 59, Issue 1, Pages 89-94, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.smallrumres.2004.11.010.

Specific changes are:
1. Line 72: change “keeping livestock in the improvement programs” to “maintaining livestock in improvement programs”
2. Line 87: change “Department of Agriculture (USDA)” to “Agency for International Development (USAID)”
3. Line 116: a brief description of the breeding value calculation is needed.
4. Line 138: FGD not defined
5. Line 181: change “flock” to “herd”
6. Line 389: citation number is actually 24

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

I read your article "Experiences from the implementation of community-based goat breeding programs in Malawi and Uganda: a potential approach for conservation and improvement of indigenous small ruminants in smallholder farms" which I found interesting, well written and in generally good English.

I mainly have some comments on the methodology section, which I believe needs to be strengthened by adding more details on the methods used for data analysis.
In addition, you may consider the paper "Challenges and opportunities in genetic improvement of local livestock breeds" (Frontiers in Genetics, 2015) which may have content useful for the discussion of your results. Finally, I include some minor remarks on typos or little imperfections.

L138: first time you introduce the abbreviation FGDs, please make it explicit this first time
L142: please add a reference to snowball sampling, and justify why you chose this type of sampling
L158-159: it is not clear to which quantitative and qualitative data you are referring, the reader is a bit lost: a Table summarising the quantitative and qualitative variables that you analysed would be very useful
L161-164: this section is too scant in details: i) does this "coding process" have a name? What it consists of? ii) what do you mean by "Triangulation of data"? iii) how was the validation of your results performed? iv) what type of content analysis did you perform? There are many methods for data mining and for the analysis of structured or unstructured text data (content): details on the methods
that you used are needed
L201: Napak and Kamuli lie (plural)

Figure 3: please add Country information to the plot (which sites from Malawi, which from Uganda)

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Authors revised manuscript satisfactory to previous comments.