Dairy Farming Innovations for Productivity Enhancement

Abstract

Dairy farming innovations’ implementation at every farmer’s farm is the present day need; during the era of scarce natural resources coupled with population explosion, putting obvious pressure for more food production. Milk, produced from every single farm at micro level, is contributing to global economy at macro level. Dairy sector is facing the challenge of low animal productivity due to ineffective and poor farm management. This provides a big window for different innovations application to enhance animal productivity in developing nations where majority dairy farms are small scale and managed on traditional practices. Farm innovations are the novel practices/products/techniques suitable for particular area, physiological stage of animals and economically viable option to enhance the animals’ per diem yield. Despite the prevalence of innovations, the scenario for its applicability is very dismal, majority of them are yet to reach masses at root level. Farmers’ demographic, social and economic characteristics including adoption behavior, act as major impeding factors affecting impact of innovations. In this chapter, information on low cost and user friendly dairy farming innovations suitable for all kinds of farms, maintained under rural conditions existing in different tropical countries have been detailed for enhancing the animal productivity and henceforth farmers’ socio-economic welfare.