Salvaging the male

Rearing male buffalo calves for meat could be the way forward for sustaining India’s Pink Revolution — and also correcting the ‘reverse gender bias’ in bovines

LIVESTOCK HUSBANDRY

industry and open up a new avenue for rural employment. “Our price realisations on exports, too, will go up because the meat of young animals would be tender, juicer and with better sensory quality than that from spent buffaloes aged eight years or more,” claims Kondaiah.

Interestingly, the potential for fattening of MBCS for quality meat production was highlighted way back in 1995 by a report of the ICAR’S National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI) at Karnal (Haryana), which was the product of a joint consultancy project with Al-kabeer Exports Ltd. “Underfed male buffalo calves after weaning are either starved to death or pushed to (the) slaughterhouse. Such malnourished calves weighing 60 to 80 kg hardly yield 30 to 35 kg carcass of inferior quality. These calves, if reared on high energy diets up to a live body weight of 350 kg, may yield 180 kg carcass of good quality,” summed up the report, authored by NDRI scientists D D Sharma, J P Sehgal, K K Singhal and M K Ghosh.

At that time, though, the country had just three modern buffalo slaughterhouses – the Allana Group’s facility at Zaheerabad and Alkabeer’s at Rudraram (both in Medak district of Andhra Pradesh), plus Mumbai’s Deonar abattoir — and meat exports were not even Rs 500 crore a year. But with 79 approved abattoirs for exports today – most of them with integrated meat-processing plants – and annual shipments crossing Rs 29,000 crore, “we must seriously pursue the MBC option“, feels Kondaiah.

Source: Livestock Census 2012

Express photo A young male buffalo calf (top); Faizan Ahmad with his young padda being reared for meat production.