Carlos Lascano

Carlos Lascano is a Colombian citizen, who in 1965 completed undergraduate training in Agronomy at the Escuela Agrícola Panamericana in Zamorano, Honduras. Later he attended the University of Arizona in Tucson where he completed a BS in Agriculture in 1967 and an MS in Animal Science in 1970. After completing his MS studies, he joined a Feed Company (SOLLA) in Medellín, Colombia, where he served as Head of the Technical Department and was responsible for formulating feed rations for different kinds of livestock. In 1973 he joined CIAT (now the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT) and was based in Cali, Colombia, for 3 years as Coordinator of an International Training Program in Tropical Livestock. In 2006 he was awarded a scholarship by the Rockefeller Foundation and enrolled as a graduate student at Texas A &M University, College Station where he obtained a PhD in Ruminant Nutrition in 1979.

In late 1979 he came to CIAT as a Post Doctoral Fellow in the Tropical Forages Program and in 1982 he was appointed Senior Staff, responsible for research on forage quality and uses. During this time, he carried out long-term grazing experiments in the Eastern Plains of Colombia to assess productivity and tolerance of grass and grass+legume pastures under low fertilizer inputs and different management systems. These experiments proved to be a valuable resource to study the dynamics of vegetation and soil properties under contrasting management systems. In the 90s, Lascano established a dairy research facility in the Quilichao research station, located in the department of Cauca, to evaluate forage quality using short-term grazing experiments with milking cows. He also contributed by supervising numerous postgraduate theses to defining negative and positive effects of condensed tannins in legumes and to establishing differences among species and genotypes in tannin content and biological activity. He made valuable contributions to understanding how environmental factors affect the concentration and chemical properties of condensed tannins in legumes.

In 1997 Lascano was appointed Leader of the Tropical Forage Program and for 10 years he led an international multidisciplinary team dedicated to improving forages for different tropical agro-ecosystems and production systems. Some important achievements under his lead include: 1) selection of multipurpose legumes with adaptation traits to drought and low fertility soils; 2) establishment of a private-public partnership to fund, develop, and promote use of improved hybrids of Brachiaria, which is the most widely, planted grass in Latin America and South East Asia; 3) development of methodologies to screen forages for quality and anti-quality traits and for adaptation to biotic and abiotic constraints; 4) discovery of endophytic fungi in tropical forage grasses; and 5) identification of a mechanism for controlling the biological nitrification inhibition (BNI) capacity of Brachiaria humidicola.