A cross sectional study on beef fattening programme conducted in selected areas of Bangladesh

Abstract

The experiment was conducted to investigate the livelihood improvement of farmers through cattle fattening in six selected areas named Saidpur, Kishorgonj and Nilphamary Sadar Upazilla under the district of Nilphamary, Madhukhali and Faridpur Sadar under the district of Faridpur and last one is Daulodia Upazilla under the district of Rajbari of Bangladesh. Total 60 respondents consisting male and female were randomly interviewed those are involved in cattle fattening. An open and close ended questionnaire was used for collecting the data through face to face interview. I collected the data regarding socio- economic status of the beef cattle owner, general characteristics of the fattened cattle, their feeding and health management. The maximum number of beef fattened farmer is male (55%) and female beef fattened owner is 45%. The highest number of farmers involved in beef fattening are between 36-40 years which is 26.67 percent. Among the respondents, 60% owner completed their primary education whereas only 1.67 percent were post-graduated. About 50.82 percent farmer had taken training on beef fattening and rest of the portion did not have any training on. Local breed those were uncastrated, between 2.1-2.5 years old and reddish color were predominantly selected for fattening programme. Maximum beef cattle (89 percent) were vaccinated whereas 11 percent were not vaccinated. Among four types of commonly used vaccines, FMD vaccine was mostly given to all of the beef cattle. Most of the farmers offered their beef cattle 1-5 kg green roughage (44%). Almost 49% farmer did not give readymade feed but they offer homemade feed and commonly used feed ingredients was wheat, wheat bran, rice polish. Nobody used steroids drug but most of them used feed supplements such as zinc, aminovit, liver tonic, DCP and multivitamin. Around 25% cattle fed UMS but farmer didn’t supply UTS and UMMB. Most of the beef cattle were purchased from local market (78%) and some of the farmers selected beef cattle from own farm (22%). The highest number of beef cattle selling through local market and others through online, middle man and directly from farm. Most of the fattened cattle (52%) was sold between 100000 to 200000 taka which makes the owner profitable. Therefore, beef fattening programme can be a profitable business in Bangladesh.