Animal Feed Resources and Livestock Farming
Livestock production in tropical areas plays a crucial role, which extends beyond its traditional supply of meat and milk. Livestock are used for multiple purposes as draft power, means of transportation, capital, credit, meat, milk, social value, hides, and source of organic fertilizer for seasonal cropping livestock can utilize agricultural crop residues and farm by-products that are abundantly available. Livestock-crop holdings have been in the hands of resource-poor farmers for many decades and will remain so for many years to come. In general, farms in tropical production systems in clued traditional rice cultivation, field crop production, e.g., sugarcane, cassava, sweet potato and buffalo or cattle, or both. Feed resources are scarce in both quantity and quality especially during the dry season, which result in low productivity.
Locally available feed resources will continue to be important in feeding systems of livestock for small-holder farmers in the tropics, specially during the dry season to cope up with scarce feed resources and prevailing increased number of livestock. Improvements of straw by means of chemical treatments such as urea – treatment and proper supplementation with crop resides and concentrate and/or high-quality feed block resulted in significant increased in digestibility, intake, ADG, milk yield and quality, Further study on seasonal available of crop residues that are rich in protein, the use of concentrate mixture of optimum quality high-quality feed block (HQFB)/high-quality feed pellet (HQFP) user, as well as level of supplementation to crop-residue-based diets for productive ruminants, particularly dairy cattle, are highly recommended.
Processing of roughage to reduce bulkiness and increase storage capacity, suitable and easy transportation, should be investigated further. Provision of year-round and efficient use of roughage based on fibrous-crop-residues to ruminants will lead to enhanced production and maintained environmentally friendly atmosphere.
Furthermore, the potential use of these fibrous resources as feeds should systematically be verified and implemented on-farm uses by farmers to verify potential available technologies and possible adoptions.
Based on the light of the available information, dynamics of the production systems and the increasingly limitation of feed resources, the local feed resources would play essential role to serve as on-farm feeds for the sustainable livestock-crop small-holder farming systems.
March 01 2008 03:58 pm | Article