Nineteenth paper: Ruminant feeding strategies for sustainable
agricultural production in upland mixed-farming systems of Indonesia
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RUMINANT FEEDING STRATEGIES FOR SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION IN
UPLAND MIXED-FARMING SYSTEMS OF INDONESIA
J.C. Tanner (1), E Owen (2), M. Winugroho (3) and M. Gill (4)
(1) International Livestock Research Institute, PO Box 30709, Nairobi, Kenya
(2) Department of Agriculture, The University of Reading, Earley Gate, PO
Box 236, Reading, RG6 6AT, UK
E-Mail: E.Owen@reading.ac.uk
(3) Balai Penelitian Ternak, PO Box 221, Ciawi-Bogor, Indonesia
(4) NR International, Chatham Maritime, Kent ME4 4TB, UK
E-Mail: Margaret.Gill@nri.org
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ABSTRACT
Ruminants are an integral part of smallholder farming systems in Indonesia.
However the extent and continuous nature of cropping on densely populated
islands such as Java leaves little land available for grazing. Most
livestock are therefore permanently housed and fed indigenous forages cut
from field margins and roadsides. Cut-and-carry feeding is labour-intensive
and the supply of forage is often the most expensive input to ruminant
production. Surprisingly, farmers collect quantities of forage greatly in
excess of the appetites of their livestock. In Experiment 1, indigenous
forage dominated by Axonopus compressus, was offered to sheep at increasing
rates: 25, 50 or 75 g DM/kg liveweight (W) daily (d). The results showed
that although DM intake and W rose with increasing offer-rate, the
incremental improvements from 50 to 75 were non-significant (P>0.05) and
less than from 25 to 50. Rice bran is a cheap and readily available feed. It
could be used to substitute for a large proportion of the expensive forage
on offer. In Experiment 2, rice bran was fed to sheep at 0, 15 or 30 g DM/kg
W0.75.d in combination with indigenous forage offered at 30 or 60 g DM/kg
W.d. Sheep fed the lowest cost 30/30 (forage/rice bran) diet achieved
similar total DM intakes as those receiving the 60/0 diet and W gains as
those receiving the 60/15 diet (P>0.05). Even when using supplements
Javanese farmers persist in offering excess levels of forage to their
livestock. It is unlikely that they justify this excess feeding on the basis
of marginal gains in animal productivity alone. The rationale for excess
feeding may lie in greater yields of manure-compost produced from a mixture
of refused forage and excreta which accumulates in pits beneath the slatted
floors of their animal barns.
KEY WORDS: Excess feeding, cut-and-carry, ruminant, manure,
compost, Indonesia
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INTRODUCTION
Over 60% of Indonesia's 194 million people live on the island of Java which
occupies only 7% of the country's total land area. Half of Java's population
are farmers (Biro Pusat Statistik, 1991) cultivating less than 0.5 ha per
household (Booth, 1988). Cropping is continuous. Java is thus not only one
of the most densely populated areas of the world with around 800 person/km2
, but one of the most intensively cultivated (Kepas, 1985).
Ruminant livestock are an integral part of these intensive farming systems.
In 1991, over 30 and 60% of Indonesia's large and small ruminant populations
respectively were located on Java despite intensive cropping leaving little
land for grazing (Direktorat Jendral Peternakan, 1992). Ruminants are
instead permanently housed (around two large ruminants and/or up to five
small ruminants per household) in backyards and cut-and-carry fed indigenous
grasses and broadleaves collected from roadsides and field margins.
Cut-and-carry feeding is labour intensive making forage the most expensive
input to livestock production.
Surprisingly, farmers collect large quantities of forage, often greatly in
excess of the appetites of animals (Mathius & van Eys, 1983) with as much as
400 g/kg DM of that offered being refused (Little, Petheram & Boer, 1988).
The forage refusals are not wasted, they combine with faeces and urine
falling through the slatted floors of the animal barns into pits where they
decompose to produce manure-compost. High forage offer-rates maximise
manure-compost yield. It is possible that farmers adjust their feeding rates
to optimise total output from the livestock enterprise i.e. including
manure-compost, as opposed to animal production per se. Manure-compost is
ranked by Javanese farmers alongside offspring as the most important outputs
from livestock production (Ifar, 1996).
It is hypothesized that livestock integration into Javanese agriculture is
essential to the sustainability of some of the most intensive cropping
cycles in the world. As intensive smallholder agriculture expands onto more
marginal soils world-wide there is urgent need for developing strategies for
closer integration of crops and livestock. Excess-feeding, an effective
means of improving intake and productivity of ruminants fed low quality
forages by providing greater opportunity for selective feeding (Osafu, Owen,
Methu, Abate, Tanner & Aboud, 1996) and also generates high quality
composts, may be one such strategy. The biological and economic
relationships between excess-feeding, animal productivity and manure-compost
production are reported in this paper.
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EXPERIMENTS UNDERTAKEN
EXPERIMENT 1: Effect of quantity of indigenous forage offered on intake and
growth by sheep and manure-compost yield.
Materials and methods:
Thirty Javanese Thin-tailed rams (aged 18 months, mean W 29.1 kg, s.e. 0.3)
were blocked according to initial W and then randomly allocated to one of
three forage offer levels: 25, 50 or 75 g DM/kg W.d. Indigenous forage, cut
each morning from roadsides and field margins, comprised largely of grasses
(71% of fresh weight offered) dominated by Axonopus compressus, with the
remainder as sedges, broadleaved plants and dead plant material. The daily
ration was split into two equal meals offered at 8.00 h and 12.00 h, salt
licks and water were freely available. The feeding trial lasted 70 days
during which intake was measured daily and W changes weekly.
Refused forage, faeces and urine were collected daily from three rams per
diet, mixed and stored in slat-sided composting bins measuring 1.5x1.5x1.5m.
The waste materials were collected in this manner for the last 50 days of
the feeding trial and then left to compost for a further 50 days, turning
every 3 days to assist aeration, before weighing and sampling for DM
content.
EXPERIMENT 2: Effect of quantity of indigenous forage and rice bran offered
on intake and growth by sheep and manure-compost yield.
Materials and methods
Thirty-six Javanese Thin-tailed rams (aged 30 months, mean W 28.8 kg, s.e.
0.03) were blocked according to initial W and then randomly allocated to one
of six feeding regimes in a 2x3 factorial design: 30 or 60 g DM/kg W.d or
indigenous forage in combination with either 0, 15 or 30 g DM/k gW0.75.d of
rice bran. The diets were coded as follows (forage/rice bran): 30/0, 30/15,
30/30, 60/0, 60/15 and 60/30. The daily ration of indigenous forage (of
similar species composition to that fed in Experiment 1) and rice bran was
again split into two meals and fed at 8.00h and 12.00h. Water and salt licks
were freely available. The feeding trial lasted 42 days during which intake
was measured daily and W changes weekly.
Refused forage, faeces and urine were collected from three different pairs
of rams per diet over three 14-day periods. Accumulated waste materials from
each pair of rams were mixed at the end of each 14-day period and composted
for 50 days, turning every 3 days as described above. A quantity of forage
equivalent to that which would be fed to two, 30 kg W rams on the 60/0 diet
was also collected over each 14 day period to assess the profitability of
composting grass directly in the absence of livestock.
RESULTS
Table 1 shows that the DM intake and growth rate of the rams in Experiment 1
improved with offer-level but that the incremental improvement from 50 to 75
g DM/kg W.d was non significant (P<0.05) and less than that from 25 to 50.
The quantity of grass refused increased substantially as a proportion of
that offered from 0.109 to 0.526 by raising the offer level from 25 to 75.
Allowing the rams greater opportunity for selective feeding by raising the
offer-level improved the estimated N content of the diet consumed from 21.2
to 22.5 and 23.8 g/kg DM. Not surprisingly, manure-compost production rose
with forage offer-level.
Table 1: Effects of increasing forage offer level on intake, ram growth rate
and manure-compost yield.
Quantity of forage offered
(g DM/kg W.d) 25 50 75 s.e.d
Number of rams 10 10 10
Initial W (kg) 29.2 29.1 28.9 0.33
Growth rate (g/d) -16.5 25.8 28.5 4.73
INTAKE:
Forage offered (g/d) 3627 7772 11616
Forage offered (g DM/d) 671 1438 2149
Forage refused
(kg DM/kg DM offered) 0.109 0.359 0.526
Forage intake (g DM/d) 598 922 1019
Forage intake
(g DM/kg W.d) 22.1 31.7 34.9 1.16
Manure-compost yield
(g/ram.d) 540 1620 2320
In Experiment 2 (Table 2), forage and rice bran offered both had significant
effects upon forage DM intake, total DM intake and forage refused as a
proportion of that offered (P<0.05). Increasing the level of rice bran on
offer increased bran intake but as a consequence substituted for forage
intake. Increasing the rice bran offered caused a significant (P<0.05) rise
in W gains at each level of forage on offer. It should be noted that rams
fed the 30/30 (forage/rice bran) diet grew faster but produced less manure
compost than those fed the 60/0 diet.
Table 2: Effects of increasing forage and rice bran offer levels on intake,
ram growth rate and manure compost yield.
Forage offered
(g DM/kg W.d) 30 60
----------------- -----------------
Rice bran
(g DM/kg W0.75.d) 0 15 30 0 15 30 s.e.d
Number of rams 6 6 6 6 6 6
Initial W (kg) 28.9 29.7 28.8 28.9 28.4 28.9 0.73
Growth rate (g/d)-21.0 13.2 37.5 -2.4 34.5 53.6 22.8
INTAKE:
Forage offered
(g DM/d) 810 853 848 1702 1683 1750
Forage refused
(kg DM/kg
DM offered) 0.174 0.246 0.277 0.463 0.516 0.539
Forage intake
(g DM/d) 670 644 616 909 815 804 51.6
Forage intake
(g DM/kg W.d) 24.3 22.3 21.3 31.6 28.5 27.1 0.62
Rice bran intake
(g DM/kg W0.75.d) - 13.7 25.4 - 14.4 23.5
TOTAL INTAKE
(g DM/kg W.d) 24.3 28.2 32.3 31.6 34.7 37.2 1.49
Manure-compost
yield (g/ram.d) 607 964 1107 2750 3071 3357
In Experiment 1, although the high feeding levels produce the best W gains
and manure-compost yields these benefits must be offset against the extra
time required to supply the feed (Table 3). The most profitable ration would
be that which yields the highest returns to labour (calculated as: [Value of
outputs - Non labour costs]/hours of labour). The financial analysis reveals
that feeding at 50 gDM/kg M.d was most profitable irrespective of whether
manure-compost was considered as an output or not. The lowest level of
feeding was unprofitable with the costs of production alone (excluding
labour inputs) exceeding the value of growth and manure-compost production.
Table 3: Estimated cost of production (Rp1/ram.d), value of outputs
(Rp/ram.d) and returns to labour (Rp/hour) when feeding indigenous forage to
rams at increasing levels of offer.
COSTS OUTPUTS RETURNS TO LABOUR
Labour*2 Other*3 Compost*4 Weight*5 Including Excluding
(h) (Rp/d)*1 (Rp/d) (Rp/d) compost compost
Offer (Rp/h) (Rp/h)
-rate
25 0.42 18.6 18 -50 -120 -163
50 0.83 18.6 54 77 135 70
75 1.2 18.6 77 86 120 56
*1: USD 1 = Indonesian Rupiah (Rp) 2110 (1993 rate)
*2: The lowest cost of forage input corresponds to the lowest forage offer
level (25 g DM/kgW.d) and the highest forage cost to the highest forage
offer level (75 gDM/kgW.d) assuming it takes 5.9 minutes to cut 1 kg of
grass (derived from van Eys et al, 1984 and Amir et al, 1985).
*3: Non-labour costs, in decreasing order of magnitude, including
depreciation on the sheep barn, minerals, anthelmintics and miscellaneous
expenses on ropes etc.
*4: On average, a 30 kg sack of manure-compost fetches Rp 1000 (Holden et
al, 1993),equivalent to Rp. 33/kg.
*5: Assuming a sale price of Rp. 3000/kg (or Rp 3/g) (Biro Pusat Statistik,
1991).
In Experiment 2, feeding unsupplemented forage diets gave negative returns
to labour when outputs did not include manure-compost. Supplementing rams
improved profitability through higher animal growth rates. Including
manure-compost as an output substantially improved the profitability of all
diets. However, it should be noted that it is more profitable to compost
forage directly than to feed that quantity to an animal. Greater returns
could however be achieved through supplementation. At the highest rate of
supplementation (Diet 60/30) a farmer could increase returns to labour by
around 50% compared with composting the same quantity of grass directly.
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CONCLUSIONS
Excess-feeding strategies have been demonstrated to be an effective means of
improving intake and productivity of small ruminants and cattle fed low
nutritive value fodders such as cereal crop residues (Osafo, Owen, Methu,
Abate, Tanner & Aboud, 1996). Offering excessive levels of feed inevitably
produces large quantities of refusals which appears wasteful. In many
smallholder situations excess-feeding may only be economically rational if
other uses can be found for refusals.
Excess-feeding indigenous forages led to higher intakes and growth rates
which raised returns to labour (Experiment 1). It was demonstrated that the
profitability of the livestock enterprise could be significantly improved
however by using the refusals and excreta to produce compost. Although,
feeding at the highest offer-level yielded a positive return to labour, the
calculated 'hourly wage rate' was 11% less than that obtained from feeding
the 50 g DM/kg W.d diet where compost is included in the total output and
20% less where compost is excluded from outputs.
A cheaper alternative to feeding high levels of expensive cut-and-carry
forage might be to replace part of the diet with rice bran. In Experiment 2,
feeding rams the 30/30 diet resulted in better returns to labour than the
60/0 diet. However, the most expensive diets, 60/15 and 60/30, where rice
bran is fed in addition to excess levels of forage, turned out to be the
most profitable. This suggests that even in circumstances where Javanese
farmers are feeding rice bran they will persist in offering high levels of
forage to maximise not only W gain but also manure-compost output.
The need to maximise manure-compost output is particularly acute on
smallholder farms in densely populated areas where intensive cropping
patterns place heavy demand upon soil nutrient status. The research shows
that excess-feeding represents a financially rational feeding strategy for
such production systems permitting the optimisation of animal and fertiliser
outputs.
As the price of inorganic fertilisers continues to rise beyond the means of
smallholder farmers, greater reliance will be placed upon livestock wastes
to maintain soil fertility. However, even when the yield of organic
fertiliser outputs from livestock is maximised by excess-feeding for
example, the quantity of plant nutrients may not be sufficient to totally
replace artificial fertilisers in a manner which is economically viable.
Animal scientists should be aware that excreta is often used in combination
with inorganic fertilisers. There is a need to be able to predict the
influence of diet upon excreta quality and the consequences of manure
handling upon nutrient loss. A better understanding of the degree to which
livestock management practices influence the plant nutrient contents of
animal "wastes" would provide agronomists with greater confidence to make
integrated fertiliser recommendations which could, for example, capitalise
upon the reported synergy between limited quantities of inorganic and
organic fertilisers. The development of livestock feeding strategies for
mixed-farming systems should therefore take into account not only livestock
requirements but also the nutrition of soils and crops.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Authors acknowledge funding from the Overseas Development Administration
(UK).
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REFERENCES
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Excess feeding of stovers form sorghum and maize for small ruminants and
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