By Joshua Kato
According to Dr Jolly Kabirizi, who addressed during the 16th African Dairy Conference and Exhibition at Hotel Africanaon Innovations in improved technologies; to optimize production lessons from Small Scale Farmers, over 40% of the garbage collected from urban markets is agricultural wastes that can be processed into feed for livestock.
“Three-quarters of the garbage rots uncollected on pavements, streets, sewerage outlets and water channels. This unfortunate tragedy is witnessed especially in markets, blurring the city’s image and posing a serious health danger,” she said.
Kabirizi told the delegates that for small-scale dairy cattle farmers, high-grade conventional feed resources such as Napier grass, for example, patchong have been innovated to improve daily feeding.
Kabirizi said that it is necessary to innovate and increase the availability of alternative feed resources for cattle, for example adopting ‘waste’ like banana peels, Mexican sunflower, sweet potato vines, maize stover, hydroponic maize and agro-industrial wastes such as molasses has an appreciable level of nutrient and can be adopted in dairy cattle.
“Most of these agricultural wastes have high nutrient levels of Nitrogen, Potassium, and Phosphorus. Such wastes can be processed and converted into high-quality livestock (cattle, goats, rabbits and pig) feeds,” Kabirizi told the conference.
She explained that this alternate method of utilisation of agricultural wastes by livestock farmers can reduce the cost of production, and environmental pollution thus improving environmental health, livestock productivity and household income.
Kabirizi explained to the delegates that farmers can use banana peels, and sorghum stovers which are readily available.
The delegates learnt that with increased milk production there is a need to increase feed resources.
