Feeding Practices and Productivity of Dairy Cows in the Suburban Area of Dakar

Abstract

Feeding practices, and reproduction and milk production performances were studied in a dairy farm in the suburban area of Dakar. A survey on feeding practices was carried out in September- October 2004. The analysis of recorded data enabled to calculate the average milk production per cow between November 2003 and October 2004, and reproduction parameters between 1991 and 2004. The fodder area (30 ha) and the number of cows (84) were markedly higher than those of the majority of suburban Dakar dairy farms. Nevertheless, the animal feed depended still heavily on the supplies of rice straw and concentrates. The difficulties to acquire these inputs led to many changes in the feeding diets. Moreover, as there was a mixture of several and very different cattle genotypes within the same feeding groups, the daily requirements in basic nutritive elements were seldom met for high producing cows. These bad management conditions resulted in poor average milk production (1972 kg/cow/year), a late age at first calving for heifers born in Senegal (37 months) and long calving intervals (17 months). The analysis of the factors affecting the reproduction results showed that the calving interval was highly related to the genetic type and to interannual climatic variations. These observations show the importance of environmental factors (climate, feeding management) on cows’ performances and the need to strictly adapt feeding practices to the genetic type.