Pasture establishment and management practices of smallholder dairy farmers in Cagayan Province, Philippines
Paper Details
Pasture establishment and management practices of smallholder dairy farmers in Cagayan Province, Philippines
Abstract
Proper pasture management plays a major role to produce higher productivity of livestock, thus, this study was conducted to determine the current pasture establishment and management of smallholder dairy farmers in Cagayan province. In terms of the profile of respondents, Dairy farmers are dominated by male, married, small family size, mean age of 47, elementary graduates, and have an income of PhP4,000- PhP5,000/month. On their present practices, most Cagayanos dairy farmers have 3 ha. field cultivated, most of them have Carabao (Murrah buffalo) as livestock owned when compared to cow (Brahman bree) and goat (Anglo lubian), in terms of years of handling, the shortest year ranging to 20-25 years, and the longest handling year is 60-65 years. For land preparation, respondents engaged themselves in zero tillage rather than cultivation, most of them have no planting materials while other farmers used forages, they more practiced asexual propagation and adopt pasture cut and carry procedure. On the Attitudes and motivation of dairy farmers, they strongly agreed that forages increase milk and livestock production, agrees that forages confer resistance to diseases, produced supply and quality forages, and increases carrying capacity. With all the above results, the study has shown that dairy farmers in Cagayan province have a very small proportion of land available for pasture development, lack of dairy technology, trainings, and seminars, the high opportunity cost of labors are some of the main constraints recorded and must be addressed.
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