Farmer participatory assessment of nutritional interventions for productivity and profitability enhancement of dairy animals at small farms

The present study was conducted across 18 districts falling under eight Agro-climatic zones in Uttar Pradesh functioning under aegis of ICAR-ATARI, Kanpur with the aim of assessment of nutritional interventions for productivity enhancement of dairy animals in the selected villages. Through Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) and Problem-Cause analysis (PCA) in the selected villages, issues of lower level of milk production and sub-optimal fertility potential were figured out to be topmost problems among the dairy animals of the selected area. The potential causes of the poor performance of dairy animals identified were lack of energy and micronutrients in the feed, suboptimal rumen health, imbalanced ration and feeding of poor-quality roughages. To overcome the prevailing problems of small and marginal dairy farmers, the innovative technologies related to nutritional intervention (bypass nutrients, rumen modifiers, mineral mixture etc.) for dairy animals, released from different ICAR institutes and state agricultural universities were subjected for On Farm Testings (OFTs) for assessing their field level appropriateness. The results of different OFTs conducted, confirmed significantly higher milk production, improved fertility, higher benefit:cost ratio in treatment groups with improved technologies over control groups with farmer’s practice of feeding and positive reactions of the farmers for adoption of those technologies. The present study concluded that adoption of these tested technologies like daily feeding of mineral mixture, bypass nutrients, probiotics etc. may improve the productivity of dairy animals under the field conditions.