adminTHIS week I will discuss one key herd management practice, which most smallholder farmers either ignore or are ignorant of its importance. This is called herd rationalisation, which simply refers to a deliberate effort made to influence the shape and form of your herd composition as a livestock farmer.
Herd rationalisation is important to a livestock farmer because it directly influences your herd growth and your offtake. I have seen smallholder farmers with 15 head which comprises up to 10 oxen and the farmer sees nothing wrong with this herd composition but still wonders why his herd is not growing. As a general rule of the thumb at least 70 percent of your herd should comprise the breeding cows.
I have seen some smallholder farmers who are in very dry marginal areas but have an obsession with crop production to the extent that he keeps eight oxen for draught power so that he can harvest less than 10 bags. This is obviously wasteful as most of the oxen can be sold and the money invested in something more productive such as increasing the number of breeding cows.
If as a farmer you increase your attention towards breeding cows it becomes very easy to define which animals will comprise your offtake. In other words which ones should you sell and generate revenue from your beef production enterprise. These are your excess oxen, old cows which need replacing, non-productive cows for whatever reason, excess heifers and your steers.
The offtake generally comprises passengers in your herd which do not contribute to growth. If as a farmer you ensure that at any given time your herd is rationalised to allow for growth and revenue generation you will definitely register a phenomenal herd growth in a very short time.
Talking about breeding cows in your herd, it is important to make sure these are breeding cows, not just cows. In other words are they giving you calves when they should? In that regard it is increasingly becoming important for farmers to start adopting management practices such as pregnancy diagnosis. This is a simple exercise of verifying whether those cows that were put to the bull did conceive.
I learnt the importance of this practice the hard way after I sold an income heifer to a local butchery operator who slaughtered the heifer and of course found a calf inside. What a painful loss. This is a heifer which I had bought into my herd and it stayed for three years without calving down. The decision to sell it was cemented by the stockman claims that the heifer has never been seen on heat and hence dismissing it as a freemartin.
Farmers should therefore undertake to carry out pregnancy diagnosis on their cows and most importantly to those you want to cull so that you don’t sell an in-calf cow at the price of an empty one.
Pregnancy diagnosis is an exercise which an average veterinary officer should be able to carry out. Farmers can actually invest in getting trained in this simple but very important exercise. Matopos Research Station is more than able to provide such training to farmers.
There are obviously many methods of conducting Pregnancy Diagnosis (PDs) but the simplest and cheapest for an average farmer is the rectal palpation one. This involves inserting your hand into the rectum of your cow and feeling for the foetus, fluid and foetal membranes.
There are other methods of PDs such as testing for progesterone and ultrasound palpation but these are for specialised commercial setups especially in the dairy sector and will obviously be impractical and perhaps unnecessarily sophisticated and expensive for smallholder beef production farmer. The long and short of it therefore, is that farmers need to do PDs in their cows as a management practice especially in assessing the fertility of your herd.
I know this can be very difficult in a communal set up where the bull is constantly running with the cows and there are no proper records in terms of servicing of cows but something can and should be done.
Uyabonga umntakaMaKhumalo.
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