Constraints in Sustainable Goat Production: Market, Fodder, and Land Issues in Maharashtra and Farmer-driven Solutions

Goat farming plays a critical role in sustaining rural livelihoods and ensuring food security among smallholder farmers in Maharashtra's semi-arid regions, yet contemporary goat farming encounters significant challenges spanning market access, feed availability, infrastructure, and resource management dimensions that limit productivity and threaten the sustainability of livestock-based livelihood systems. This study examined the critical constraints affecting sustainable goat production in Maharashtra, focusing on market-related barriers, fodder scarcity, and grazing land degradation while analyzing farmer-identified constriants and documenting community-driven solutions to enhance the resilience and profitability of goat farming systems. A cross-sectional survey was conducted with 240 goat farmers selected through stratified random sampling from 24 villages across five operational clusters in Ahmednagar, Nashik, and Pune districts, employing interviews focusing on constraint identification, ranking, and farmer-suggested solutions with thematic categorization and frequency-based ranking analysis. Five primary constraints were identified and ranked by severity: middlemen dominance affecting price realization, limited availability of nutritious green fodder during dry seasons, inability to sell goats at doorstep, rapidly reducing grazing land and unavailability of feed supplements, while farmers advocated five key solutions including linking to Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) for enhanced market access, subsidized quality fodder seeds and silage-making inputs, e-marketing platforms through FPOs, fodder plantation on grazing lands, and community-based feed supplement production. Marketing challenges dominate farmer concerns, with middlemen exploitation emerging as the foremost constraint limiting income potential, and the overwhelming preference for FPO-based solutions indicates the critical importance of institutional interventions alongside technical improvements, demonstrating that success in addressing constraints requires coordinated efforts integrating institutional development, technological support, and market infrastructure creation for enhancing the sustainability and resilience of smallholder goat farming systems in Maharashtra's semi-arid regions.