Common bean is widely grown as a food legume and the post-harvest crop residues (CR) (i.e. haulm + pod wall (HPW)) are valuable as ruminant feedstuffs. The yields and constituents indicative of nutritive value for ruminants of the HPW from a wide range of common bean genotypes (G) were examined at 4 trial sites in Ethiopia during the 2013 main cropping season to assess the extent of genetic variation among G for simultaneous improvement of both HPW attributes and seed yield. Attributes measured were seed and HPW yields and the amounts of the morphological components, their concentrations of total nitrogen (N), neutral detergent fibre (aNDFom) and acid detergent fibre (ADFom), and the dry matter digestibility (DMD). The constituents were measured using near infrared
Limited supply of quality feed is the most common problem limiting livestock productivity in sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA). Routine feed evaluation is indispensable for formulating balanced rations, feed characterization, safety, and minimizing the environmental impact of livestock. Traditional wet chemistry has not met this demand in SSA because it is time consuming, expensive, reliant on imported reagents and equipment that requires regular maintenance. Near infrared reflectance spectroscopy (NIRS) is a rapid and accurate alternative. The NIRS can help meet the need to characterize locally available forages and feeds on the continent, thus allowing formulation of optimally balanced and safe rations, facilitating establishment of nutritive value‐based pricing, and improving feed marketing and environmental stewardship. Though several NIRS systems have been purchased in many SSA countries, few are currently used. Reasons include high upfront costs, lack of requisite technical capacity, lack of access to comprehensive wet chemistry‐based databases to develop and validate robust and accurate predictive equations, lack of access to or relevance of existing validated equations, and limited awareness about the value of NIRS. Recently developed portable devices can dramatically reduce cost, while providing flexibility and comparable accuracy to benchtop systems. Formation of NIRS consortia and communities of practice including public–private partnerships that link equipment, pool resources, and provide periodic training and troubleshooting, can address many of these problems. This paper elaborates the potential for using NIRS to improve feed analysis in SSA countries, the reasons for the low use of existing systems, and strategies to improve the adoption and use of NIRS.
Dairy cattle production is an integral part of smallholder farming systems in the central highlands of Ethiopia, but it is characterized by low milk productivity mainly due to nutritional constraints. This study assessed the comparative advantage of using improved forage-based feeding system over the traditional feeding practices on feed intake, milk yield and quality, and cost benefit analysis of crossbred dairy cows under smallholder farmers. The study was conducted at Welmera and Ejere districts on 12 farmers and two cows per farmer, and two dietary treatments were assigned to each cow randomly, and the study lasted 8 weeks. The treatments were: 1) intervention diet composed of oats-vetch mixture hay with concentrate supplementation at the rate of 0.5 kg/l of milk and 2) basal diet following farmers’ current feeding practices: crop residues and native hay, commonly soaked with local brewery residue (“Atela”) and water. The results showed that there was no difference in total dry matter intake between the two diets. However, the basal feed intake was higher in the traditional feeding practice by 11% whereas the concentrate intake was higher in the intervention diet by 25%. Crude protein intake was significantly higher (P<0.05) in the intervention group by 23%. As a result, milk yield was increased by 36% under oat-vetch mixed fodder-based feeding system as compared to the traditional feeding practice. Consequently, the amount of feed required per unit of milk was lower in the intervention group, indicating higher feed conversion efficiency as compared to the traditional feeding practice. On the other hand, there was no significant variation in milk composition between the two groups. Partial budget analysis indicated that the benefit from the intervention diet (95 birr/cow/day) was greater by 266% than that obtained from the traditional practice (45 birr/cow/day). Utilization of improved forage varieties was proven to play significant role in supplying good quality and abundant feed resource that increased milk yield and also fetch additional economic return for smallholder farmers compared to the existing traditional practice. In general, this study demonstrates that adoption of improved forage production and feeding practices along with sufficient training on balanced ration formulation has been observed to increase dairy productivity and food security through provision of sustainable livelihood opportunity for smallholder farmers.
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