The major climatic, edaphic and present social and agricultural characteristics of the study area have been described in Section 1. With regard to animal production, the area can be divided roughly into four enterprise zones, which closely follow the agroclimatic potential zonation depicted in Figure 1.3 (Jaetzold and Schmidt, 1983; Pratt et al. 1966; Sombroek et al. 1982). For each of the four different enterprise zones, the sample sites in Figure 1.3 will be considered in relation to the climatic scenarios selected in Section 2.