El Niño threatens Nigeria's food supply, livestock, prices

Under the relentless mid-morning sun, the air over Nigeria hangs heavy, suffocating, and dry. Across dusty pastoral tracks and inside tightly packed commercial livestock pens, a quiet crisis is unfolding. What many smallholder farmers initially brushed off as merely another punishing dry season coupled with an extended Harmattan has revealed itself as a far more formidable adversary: a severe, global climate shift triggered by the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

Mr Klinton Ehigiator, General Manager of Royal Farmyard and Royal Feeds Ltd, and Dr. Olupitan Edward Olumoyo, an animal scientist specializing in physiology and reproduction at the Owo Local Government Secretariat dived into the escalating impacts of this atmospheric disruption that have drawn urgent warnings and practical recommendations in relation to this matter.

Together, they have outlined the mechanics, operational strains, livestock mortality and farm-level mitigation of El Niño across Nigeria, identifying the unprecedented warming of environmental conditions, erratic water access and the compounding shock of feed price inflation as the primary threats crippling livestock health and destabilizing West Africa’s broader food security.

For seasoned agriculturalists, distinguishing between expected seasonal aridity and a global climatic anomaly comes down to specific meteorological signals and atmospheric behavior. Mr Ehigiator emphasizes that understanding weather trends is no longer optional for agribusinesses.

He says that El Niño is a natural climate phenomenon associated with unusual warming of the surface waters of the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. Now, this warming influences atmospheric circulation and has altered rainfall and temperature patterns across different parts of the world. For West Africa, Nigeria precisely, the effect differs and is going to alter our climatic conditions drastically and periodically... making it very, very different from an ordinary dry season which we expect around this period coupled with the Harmattan.

With official alerts from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirming an intensified El Niño cycle extending into early 2027, livestock producers must urgently calculate how changing weather translates directly into animal health, feed consumption, water security, and soaring production costs.

Reinforcing these field observations, Dr. Olupitan Edward Olumoyo explains the underlying physiological and atmospheric mechanics driving the shift. Under normal conditions, prevailing trade winds blow from east to west, but an El Niño phase weakens or reverses these currents, sending dry, warm air flowing irregularly from west to east.

Dr. Olumoyo describes, "El Niño is a condition of weather in which winds from the west will blow east. It's a warming situation, and warm current will be blowing from the ocean, Tropical Pacific Ocean, towards the west. It has an adverse effect on the body of both human, animal, and the plant because it creates unusual temperature to human beings, unusually high pressure to animals, as well as to crop production. As a result of that, it leads to heat stress to all the living organisms."

Dr. Olumoyo warns that because plants rely on water as the vital medium to absorb nutrients from the soil, drought induced by El Niño leaves even naturally fertile land biologically inert. As a result, critical staple crops such as maize, rice, and soybeans face devastating yield risks, setting off a domino effect throughout the entire agricultural value chain.

Both experts point to the physiological limitations of major farm animals, specifically their inability to thermoregulate effectively during extreme heatwaves, as the primary driver of soaring farm mortality rates. Mr Ehigiator points out that livestock animals, particularly poultry and swine, lack functional sweat glands. To dissipate internal body heat, birds resort to rapid panting, which severely compromises egg production, egg size, and shell quality in laying hens, while causing broilers to lose their appetite entirely. This directly undermines the Feed Conversion Ratio (FCR), a crucial economic metric measuring how efficiently an animal converts feed into body weight. Citing data from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO),

Mr Ehigiator highlights, "It is discovered that for birds, every temperature change above 35°C, which is body temperature, it's observed that the birds reduce their feed consumption by 3% to 5%. So you can imagine your birds taking less feed due to the climatic condition. It's going to affect your potential in terms of your numbers, in terms of when you expect to sell the birds... and severely, it could also lead to mortalities as a result of heat conditions."

Swine production suffers a similar fate; pregnant sows under severe thermal distress eat significantly less, starving fetal development and reducing average litter sizes from 15 piglets down to 7 or 8, while risking heat stroke and sudden paralysis.

Dr. Olumoyo aligns directly with these observations, stressing that extreme heat combined with water stress inflicts severe cellular and biological damage across poultry, cattle, goats, sheep, and small ruminants like rabbits.

As Dr. Olumoyo explains, "Heat waves or heat stress and excessive dehydration, that is water stress, highly have a negative impact on livestock farming, creating excessive mortality in poultry, goat, cattle rearing, as well as small livestocks... This excess heat will lead to generation of reactive oxygen and reactive nitrogen, and which leads to the reduction in the endogenous antioxidants of the body of livestock. The overall effect is reduced productivity, increased mortality and a reduced profit margin."

The crisis within the livestock pens is inextricably linked to the broad destruction of field crops. Commercial livestock farming depends heavily on a steady, affordable supply of raw feed ingredients like maize and soybeans. While feed ingredients naturally experience seasonal price fluctuations, widespread crop failures triggered by El Niño severely exacerbate raw material inflation.

As Mr Ehigiator observes, "Livestock and crop production are intertwined. So interconnected that the sustainability of commercial livestock depends significantly on the availability of affordable proper raw materials. When these feed ingredients become very expensive or unavailable, farmers may now struggle to maintain their normal feeding programs. Therefore, for commercial use, you have to increase your price of feed so that you'll be able to meet up with your cost of production."

When drought shrinks grain yields, commercial feed mills are forced to hike feed prices to cover their procurement costs. Animal farmers cannot simply pause feeding their stock, leaving them with no choice but to absorb massive financial losses or pass the inflated costs directly onto consumers in the form of higher prices for eggs, meat, and dairy products.

Beyond commercial farm boundaries, El Niño is equally devastating open grazing lands, altering traditional transhumance patterns and threatening rural stability. Ruminants rely heavily on natural vegetation and surface water bodies, but irregular rainfall and prolonged dry spells cripple pasture regeneration and degrade the nutritional quality of available forage. Cattle herds are forced to trek vast distances in search of feed and water, driving intense competition for diminishing natural resources.

As Mr Ehigiator warns, "When rainfall due to the El Niño becomes irregular or we now have prolonged dry conditions as it is right now, pasture regeneration will become affected. For most herders, it happens that it's going to lead to competition. And this is what also drives insecurity in the country because some of the herders might end up going to other people's farm. instead of going to other people's farm that they feed in better condition, they will go there, pick up crops from there to feed their own herds, and before you know it, it leads to the farmers-herders clash as usually experienced."

Dr. Olumoyo concurs, noting that multi-year climate pressures have eroded topsoil nutrients and depleted wild pastures, creating an unsustainable struggle for land and water between agricultural communities.

Despite the severity of these challenges, both experts outline practical, low-cost "climate-smart" solutions that farmers can implement immediately to protect their herds and crops. For livestock management, Mr Ehigiator recommends shifting feeding schedules away from scorching afternoon hours to early morning (6:00 AM to 8:00 AM) and cooler evening hours (after 4:00 PM) so animals can digest feed without compounding internal body heat.

Water management is equally critical: storage tanks should be kept half-filled so fresh, cool water is continuously pumped rather than left to heat up in full tanks, and ice blocks can be placed directly into drinking troughs while warm water is flushed from pen delivery pipes each afternoon. Dr. Olumoyo suggests installing overhead shower sprinklers inside pens to provide direct evaporative cooling.

Additionally, reducing stocking density inside pens improves natural airflow, while dynamically managing side tarpaulins, raising them during hot afternoons for ventilation and lowering them during sudden cold rains, prevents damp litter and disease outbreaks like coccidiosis. Adding salt, electrolytes, and multivitamins to drinking water further helps animals maintain hydration and cellular immunity against thermal shock.

On the agronomic front, Dr. Olumoyo champions agroecology and agroforestry as vital defenses against soil moisture loss and heat stress.

As Dr. Olumoyo points, "The low-cost practical climate adaptation measure that crop and livestock farmers put in place immediately is human efforts... That is, planting shade trees across your farms, either tree farm, goat and sheep, rabbitry, fish ponds, under concrete or attic, and the cattle herders. There should be planting of shade trees, especially the economic shade trees, like planting of mango, planting of oil palm tree, planting of cashew nut tree... in which they will serve both purposes as cushioning the high temperature effect and supplying economic products."

Crop farmers should also combine organic mulching with micro-irrigation to retain topsoil moisture during extended dry spells.

Preventing localized climate shocks from escalating into a full-scale national food emergency requires coordinated institutional action. Both experts stress that universities, research institutions like Lagos State University (LASU), and government agencies must bridge the gap between scientific data and practical farm operations. Mr Ehigiator calls for state-backed investments in commercial fodder banks, centralized livestock water facilities, and dedicated research into heat-tolerant livestock breeds and cross-breeding programs.

To ensure early warnings reach the ground, Dr. Olumoyo emphasizes leveraging digital communication tools already used by the farming community.

"Immediate data-driven intervention, institutions like LASU and other government agencies should deploy to translate climate early warning into farm-level action is going... Put the information into farm chat or farm link. This will make it viral to all the available farmers. Most farmers are now into farm chat or farm links. So when this information gets to the farm chat or farmers chat or farm link, it will be carried by more than 70% of the farmers, home and abroad."

Broadcasting real-time weather alerts, shade-tree planting guides and thermal management protocols directly to farmers' phones transforms climate data into immediate, life-saving protection for West Africa's agricultural sector.