Open Nucleus Breeding Strategy for Fogera Cattle Breed in Ethiopia: Achievements and Lessons Learnt

Abstract

Fogera cattle are one of the promising indigenous milk type local breed of Ethiopia. The objective of this paper was to evaluate the performance of Fogera breed under open nucleus breeding scheme. The work was done in two purposively selected districts (Gondar Zuria and Fogera) with community-based breed productivity improvement (CBBPI) as an approach. The collected data was analysed by GLM procedure of SAS for fixed factors estimation. Genetic parameters estimate was made by ASREML software for heritability and correlation. The overall milk yield of the nucleus herd was 2.26 ± 0.794 litter. From the total herd, best 10% and 25% of them give a respective milk yield of 3.31 and 2.87 litter; and some elite cows give an average of 5.45 ± 0.73 litter with a maximum yield of eight litters per day. The overall birth and weaning weight of nucleus herd calves was 21.30 ± 0.06 and 103.66 ± 0.59kg, respectively. Heritability for birth and weaning weight was 0.24 ± 0.09 and 0.18 ± 0.05, respectively. The phenotypic and genotypic correlation with their respective standard error between birth and weaning weight was 0.0613 ± 0.0075 and 0.0712 ± 0.0343, respectively. For CBBPI program, 17 pure Fogera bulls were distributed to the two districts. The birth and weaning weight of the village calves was 23.77 ± 0.21 and 85.89 ± 1.07, respectively. Through the program, above 1000 households were benefiting through the breeding program, health, forage development and grazing land management. To share the achievements of the results in CBBPI program, popularization through filed days and innovation platforms; and documentation of each step via publications, videos and pictures was done. From the result, it can be concluded that the strategy implemented for the breed conservation “open nucleus breeding scheme” had shown progressive results and improvement was recorded. To widen the result and improve the livelihood of the farmer, scaling up of the activity should better be planned with stakeholders.