It is late August and Illiyasu Atawame is milking his cows at his hut in Jigawar Tsada, a village on the outskirts of Dutse, the Jigawa State capital. The manual routine has been a key part of his practice in the last 40 years.
“Presently, I have three cows each with calves and the average milk I get from them every day is about six litres,” he told PREMIUM TIMES. Apart from the challenge of the breed of cattle many Nigerian herders use, which experts say is not the best for milk production, the pastoralists are also largely uneducated and get little or no support from the government.
“We now use other domestic feeds as complementary feeding to get the cows to produce more milk for sale and our household consumption,” Mr Atiku says. Although there are large industrial dairy farms in some parts of the country, a large amount of the local milk production is done by the largely uneducated Fulani pastoralists.
“Now, 30 cows cannot produce the quantity of milk produced that three cows used to produce due to challenges associated with the poor grassland. Now cattle are struggling to feed on remnants left by the roadsides, leading to constant quarrels between herders and farmers. My children have been arrested and beaten many times for encroaching on farmland.
“The forests and grazing reserves are being allocated to farmers with the Fulanis not considered. Herders who are not patient are having issues with law enforcement agencies for encroaching on farmlands in areas that used to be grazing land and forest reserves,” he narrated.“Now that I am old, I have stopped going out to sell my milk. We cook the raw milk before taking it to the market for sale. I have been doing this daily for over 30 years.
“The productivity of local cow breeds mostly managed by pastoralists is low at 0.5 to 1.5 litres of milk per day, compared to a global average of 6.6 litres per day by cows managed by pastoralists. The output from Nigeria’s managed pastures – an average of eight litres per day – is also a far cry from the global average of 30 litres per day. These are according to a recent report on the dairy sector published by PriceWaterhouseCoopers ,” Mr Akpainyang said.
The majority of the pastoralists do not benefit from government extension services like livestock producers, Mr Idris adds.
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