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Opportunities for feeding forages to pigs in Uganda

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Title Opportunities for feeding forages to pigs in Uganda
 
Creator Maass, Brigitte L.
Kabirizi, J.M.
Pezo, Danilo A.
Carter, N.
Ouma, Emily A.
Zziwa, Emmanuel
Chiuri, Wanjiku L.
 
Subject animal feeding
 
Description Pigs can play an important role in risk diversification and livelihood security of many smallholder
and poor households in Uganda. Women and youth/children provide most of the pigproduction
labour, especially for forage collection, feeding and watering; and they are responsible
for about 90% of pigs produced in Uganda. In the smallholder production systems practised
both in rural and peri-urban areas, a variety of forage species are traditionally used for pig feeding,
the majority of them being gathered for several hours every day. Overall, there is an overreliance
on feeding crop residues, ‘weeds’ and forages both through collection and scavenging/
tethering, usually not meeting the nutritional requirements of pigs, which results in slow
growth rates. Data on feeding pigs in Uganda were collected during focus group discussions
and key informant interviews in three districts, Masaka, Mukono and Kamuli, during the years
2013–2014.
In Uganda, there has been generally limited research on pigs and pig systems, while forage
research has traditionally focused on feeding ruminants. A comprehensive literature review on
feeding forages to pigs in the tropics revealed that it is mainly animal nutritionists who concern
themselves with nutritional effects of forages on the animals and their suitability as pig feeds;
aspects of integrating cultivated forages into crop-livestock production systems, labour requirements,
gender issues, and economic returns are essentially not considered. Despite the widely
recognised constraint of insufficient animal feeds, especially during dry seasons, adoption of
cultivated forages in the tropics has been generally slow, and hindering factors have not been
fully understood. Some cultivated forages show nutritional attributes suitable for pigs, technically
making them an option to supplement pigs with farm-grown forages instead of purchased
concentrates. A paradox of feeding forages to pigs in Uganda has been identified, though, that
suggests a decreasing use potential of forages along a gradient from extensive (mostly rural)
to intensive (more urban) smallholder systems, whereas CIAT’s Tropical Forages Program presumes
an increasing forage adoption potential along a gradient from subsistence- to marketoriented
smallholder systems. Investigating this paradox carefully may help better understand
reasons and conditions of smallholders under which cultivated forages may be adopted or not.
 
Date 2014-09-17
2014-10-15T10:21:32Z
2014-10-15T10:21:32Z
 
Type Poster
 
Identifier Maas, B.L., Kabirizi, J.M., Pezo, D., Carter, N., Ouma, E., Zziwa, E. and Chiuri, W.L. 2014. Opportunities for feeding forages to pigs in Uganda. Poster prepared for the Tropentag 2014 Conference on Bridging the Gap between Increasing Knowledge and Decreasing Resources, Prague, 17-19 September 2014. Nairobi, Kenya: CIAT.
https://hdl.handle.net/10568/45969
https://www.slideshare.net/ILRI/opportunities-for-feeding-forages-to-pigs-in-uganda
 
Language en
 
Rights Open Access
 
Format application/pdf
 
Publisher International Center for Tropical Agriculture