The Sunday News
Farming Issues with Mhlupheki Dube
ONE thing that most smallholder farmers and livestock practitioners agreed on is that our communal breeds need to change.
They need to improve so that productive efficiencies can also improve and the returns realised from the animals also improve.
The desire or intention to change one’s breed or traits of a particular breed to a certain individual target can be loosely defined as the breeding objective.
It is the process of combining a number of attributes or traits into a single breeding decision. Identifying breeding objectives is fundamental to planned cattle production. It is not the intention of this article to dazzle readers with the breeding jargon but just to discuss important attributes that farmers can consider when crafting their breeding objective.
Breeding objectives are the combination of various selection criteria with their respective or emphasis that we choose to place on each criterion. While most smallholder farmers may not sit down and craft and breeding objective, they however, know what they want their cows to look like and how their animals should perform in other production traits such as weaning weights and the weight at maturity. This is what they look for when they buy or borrow a bull. That is a breeding decision and its fits into the breeding objective of having heavy weaners and animals that dress heavy carcasses to give you good money.
A breeding decision should therefore be made with a sober mind and with all due consideration because the decision will impact on your enterprise for a long time to come. For example, the decision made when choosing bulls for the herd this year will influence the enterprise profitability for the next 10 to 15 years. When buying bulls or selecting a bull to use in the herd farmers should make their choice by weighing many factors such as current herd performance, environment under which the herd is grazed and market preferences for the progeny.
The environment to which you are taking the bull should be safe. I know a farmer whose $5 000 dairy bull was reduced into a heap of meat by thieves using snares and another one whose expensive bull got poisoned by umkhawuzani.
A bull is a huge investment which I have previously described as costing two arms and a leg, therefore the choice needs to be right. Selection should be based on the relative value of a range of traits production traits. These traits include fertility, growth, structure, carcass weight and temperament.
The farmer should compare all the relative traits in all the animals on offer to come to the choice of bulls or heifers. There is hardly a bull which will give you all the desired traits so it is a compromise.
A bull might be perfect in most of the traits but perhaps with a poor temperament. Depending on how the farmer weighs the desired traits he/she might drop the bull for poor temperament.
Temperament might look like a small thing to some but it can be very dangerous and tedious to work excited animals. Where, possible farmers should opt for the docile animals which make management and animal handling less dangerous and more exciting.
We will discuss more on temperament in a different article but one simple way of assessing and scoring the temperament of your animal is by looking at the position of its whorl. A whorl is the curled hairs on the forehead of the animal. It has been established scientifically that animals with a whorl which is above the eyes are generally more temperamental than those whose whorl is below the eyes.
However, with respect to bull selection, the bull for your herd must first be fertile to pass on the desirable traits to the progeny. Usually farmers go to the bull market looking for a fertile bull and end up paying through the nose for the fattest bull on sale.
Aesthetic beauty can cloud your judgement and you end up buying a heavy less fertile bull. Therefore the ancestry of the bull and its own performance should be well documented and gleaned before it goes into the pocket.
In more developed producer economies computer-based packages are used to collate production information from bulls and generate estimated breeding values which farmers can use to infer on the performance of the bull or the market. I am not sure if our records as country are up-to-date insofar as estimate breeding values are concerned. I hope that those who bought bulls at the just ended sale didn’t just buy the fattest one on offer but the most fertile as well! Uyabonga umntakaMaKhumalo.
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