Characterization of cattle husbandry practices in ... - Academic Journals

19 downloads 16582 Views 680KB Size Report
Aug 20, 2015 - schools educational status, respectively. ..... Painting the area where ticks are present with Vaseline and diesel. Provide cattle ..... Technology.
Vol. 10(34), pp. 3421-3435, 20 August, 2015 DOI: 10.5897/AJAR2015.9939 Article Number: FB58DA255147 ISSN 1991-637X Copyright ©2015 Author(s) retain the copyright of this article http://www.academicjournals.org/AJAR

African Journal of Agricultural Research

Full Length Research Paper

Characterization of cattle husbandry practices in Essera Woreda, Dawuro Zone, Southern Ethiopia Andualem Tonamo1*, Berhan Tamir2, Gebeyehu Goshu2 and Ermias Belete3 1

Department of Animal and Range sciences, Madawalabu University, Ethiopia. College of Veterinary Medicine and Agriculture, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. 3 Department of Animal and Range Sciences, Wolaita Sodo University, Ethiopia.

2

Received 23 May, 2015; Accepted 4 August, 2015

This study was conducted in Essera Woreda, Dawuro Zone of South Nations Nationalities and People Region with the objectives of characterizing cattle husbandry practices as well as identifying and prioritizing cattle production constraints of the study area. Ninety households (HHs) owning cattle were selected randomly. A semi-structured questionnaire was prepared and used to collect data on cattle production system, production constraints and available feed resources. The average family size was 6.74±0.32 per HH. Crop-livestock mixed farming was the commonly used farming system (95.5%). The mean total land holding was 2.91±0.18 ha per HH and there was no significant (P>0.05) difference in total land holding among three agro-ecologies. The average land allocated for crop production, fallow land, others and grazing land were 1.00 ± 0.26, 0.92 ± 0.20, 0.46 ± 0.19 and 0.42 ± 0.19, respectively. The results of this study showed that the average cattle herd size per HH was 11.12 ± 0.69 and was significantly (p