Animal Production Performance and Herd Management in Suckling Farms on Réunion Island

Abstract

In Réunion, because of the insularity and the small size of farms, improving cattle farm productivity involves increas­ing technical management aspects. To analyze relationships between herd management practices and animal perform­ances, a survey was conducted in ten suckling farms, located in the Highlands, from 1999 to 2002. Three sets of 4, 8 and 3 variables, respectively, were thus extracted from the moni­toring database: animal performances (calving interval, fertil­ity rate, body weight at standard age, live meat production), farmers’ practices (grazing time per hectare and paddock, time interval between two passages, paddock size, stocking rate, feed complementation of weaned animals and lactating cows, culling rate), and environment (rainfall, herbage production, body condition score of cows). An analysis of co-inertia was carried out on the first two tables to analyze relationships between animal production performances and practices. A significant correlation was observed between the two tables. The results of the co-inertia analysis were interpreted for each farm. Beyond specific constraints, they revealed proximities between farms and herd management based on various strat­egies, which were relevant with the observed performances. A STATICO analysis was performed to assess relationships between performance parameters and environment parameters for the four studied years. It revealed that there was a stable costructure between the environment and performance tables. This suggests that practices had a highly structuring effect on animal production and that some system adjustments miti­gated the climate effects.