Demand driven livestock extension services: Farmers' participatory assessment in Eastern Haryana

Abstract

India is the house of the largest livestock population as well as highest milk producing country of the world. But, productivity of the large ruminant, i.e. cattle and buffalo is far below the world standard. Hence, the delivery of livestock extension services is emerging as an important priority area for enhancing and optimizing livestock production and productivity. At present livestock farming in India is at transition phase, i.e. transforming from subsistence to a commercial venture. Therefore, 100 livestock farmers and 60 commercial livestock farmers were randomly selected from the two highly crossbred populated districts of eastern Haryana to understand their demand for livestock extension services particularly livestock extension services other than the routine one. Incomplete Order of Merit Rating as Suggested by Garret was used to assess the degree of importance of the identified demand driven livestock extension services. A total 26 livestock extension services were demanded by the farmers of the eastern Haryana amongst which three services for specialized breeding services, 5 for animal feeding purposes, 7 for livestock production and management 6 for healthcare related and 5 services towards marketing and extension services. Both types of the farmers had a highest demand for conventional livestock extension services like timely AI services, vaccination services and non-conventional extension service like demonstration-cum-training programme on Azolla production and conservation. Livestock farmers were highly interested to grow as an entrepreneur, whereas, commercial livestock farmers were highly interested to strengthen their farm by securing credit accessibility. Hence, Livestock farmers' need on specialized demand driven extension services has been identified along with their degree of importance which may help in policy formulation in future for re-institutionalized public livestock extension services.