Open-source videos can help guide smallholder farmers in low-and middle-income countries to make better decisions
By Mike Christian
Poor cattle fertility is recognised as a problem in low-and middle-income Countries (LMICs). For many smallholder farmers, their cows currently have a very low peak yield 2 months after calving. The levels then reduce rapidly. In some cases, cows only produce milk for 5-8 months after calving or will produce very little milk per day and then spend an unproductive year to eighteen months before calving again.
The normal target would be to produce a live calf every 365 days, and for dairy animals to milk for at least 10 months.
Responding to this challenge, SEBI-Livestock has collaborated with Vetbiz Consulting to develop a new set of open source training videos talking through the importance of fertility in dairy production for small holder farmers in LMIC.
Dairy cattle fertility training videos
The aim of these videos is that they are easily used, shared, translated and understood by farmers and advisors to improve cattle fertility and production. The tables and images used in the videos are available as handouts from the links below the videos or from this web site.
The first three can be used with farmers to discuss dairy fertility.
The videos can be used as the basis for training extension workers in small group settings. The course is also available as a certificated CPD course.
A growing portfolio of Livestock Development training materials
The new fertility videos expands the existing portfolio of Livestock Development released by SEBI-Livestock and partners in the past few years.
These include successful mastitis videos available in English, Oromo and Amharic, with versions with Hausa and Fulani sub titles on the University of Edinburgh media channel.
The Train the Trainer course for Mastitis Management, to run alongside the videos for training extension workers.
These works are licensed for free use under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Users may copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. Please give appropriate credit as follows:
Copyright © The University of Edinburgh 2019 CC BY
Copyright © Arpexas (Scotland) Ltd. 2021
Next steps
The authors and the University of Edinburgh would hope to see these open-source materials widely used by interested dairy development practitioners. Please get in touch if you are interested in using or disseminating these at the local level.
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