A pragmatic approach for rehabilitation of grazing lands and augmenting fodder availability in dry areas

Abstract

In dry areas, about 60 per cent of land is available for grazing consisting of permanent pasture lands, forest lands, fallow and cultivated wastelands. Thus, huge area fall under this category, this is not being scientifically managed. Sustainability of these lands is a serious concern for livestock production. Besides, productivity of animals in these areas entirely depends upon natural fodder resources. Therefore, an integration of improved fodder production systems on these lands is a hard pressing need. Hence, some rain-fed fodder based technologies have been suggested to overcome this problem, which may contribute to enhance and sustain the livelihood and fodder security in dry areas of the country. Moreover, silvi-pasture system could generate employment of 120 man days/ ha/year. Thus, available 50 million hectare of land can provide job to 20 million people annually in the country, additionally it helps in sorting out the fodder crunch during lean period