Shrinking rangelands require active participation of farmers in animal nutritional management

ONE undeniable fact for most smallholder livestock farmers utilising communally managed grazing system, is that the grazing lands are increasingly becoming inadequate in size and increasingly becoming unproductive due to a cocktail of factors which include poor rangeland management practices.

The rangelands are shrinking because of expanding human population which comes with an increased demand for arable land.

Again because of the banking environment which have persisted in our economy for close to two decades, more and more people are preferring to lock their hard-earned cash in livestock as opposed to banking.

Consequently, more households are keeping larger numbers of livestock as various family members in that homestead try to hedge their investment against erosion by inflationary factors.

Poor rangeland management principles have seen some previously productive grazing areas deteriorating into less productive pieces of land thereby significantly reducing the carrying capacity of the rangelands in most communal areas.

A few characteristic of unproductive rangelands include increase in unpalatable grass species which livestock hardly graze, while the palatable species almost vanish.

This means that you have a grazing area that has mostly grasses which animals will not graze because it is unpalatable and perhaps of poor nutrient value as well.

The rangelands also become severely encroached in terms of woody species which inhibits undergrowth. With very little grass growing underneath highly canopied rangelands, the carrying capacity of the rangeland becomes severely reduced.

All these factors mentioned above mean that livestock farmers existing in such areas need to adopt deliberate management practices that seek to address the nutritional demands of their animals.

The first issue is to control the bush encroachment aspect of the rangelands by physically opening up the encroached area. However, I must hasten to indicate that this needs to be done with guidance from relevant authorities such as the Forestry Commission so that no one goes in a rampage of tree cutting and regress the community into a deforestation stage.

Once the rangeland is opened up, sunlight will penetrate, animals will be able to move around the area, thereby scarifying the earth and seeding through manure dropping. This will promote growth of grasses in the subsequent season and your carrying capacity will also increase.

With regards to proliferation of unpalatable grasses, livestock farmers need to put together a nutritional management system that will allow for utilisation of those grasses. One such action is providing your animals with mineral licks.

The mineral licks will provide your animals with nutrients which are now in deficiency from the rangeland because of the season. This will result in optimisation of the utilisation of the unpalatable grasses in the rangeland.

In other words because your animals are getting some of the critical mineral elements from the licks provided, they are then able to reluctantly graze on the poor grasses in the veld, thereby improving utilisation and controlling them in the process.

Livestock farmers therefore need to ensure that they provide mineral supplement for their animals so that they improve optimum utilisation of the grazing.

Typically, you would put the licks out in the paddocks with unpalatable grasses and the animals will utilise both the mineral lick and the grazing around. However, this may not be possible in communal set up because the grazing is communal, and you don’t want to have your expensive mineral lick feeding the whole village herd! However, it is a nutritional proven fact in animal husbandry that a well-balanced mineral lick programme will increase calving percentage, improve weaning weights, and increase conception rates in your herd, holding other factors constant.

It is that a sound animal nutrition management practice to provide mineral supplement to your herd so as to improve production parameters as well as increase optimal utilisation of the available grazing. Uyabonga umntaka MaKhumalo.

Mhlupheki Dube is a livestock specialist and farmer. He writes in his own capacity. Feedback mazikelana@gmail.com/cell 0772851275