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Brachiaria ruziziensis fodder: A Supplementary Resource for Livestock in the Cotton Production Zone of Mali

2023; Volume: 6; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.26855/ijfsa.2022.12.008

2578-3475

Ba Alassane, Traoré Sidi Oumar, Diawara Mamadou Oumar, Amadou Traoré, Koné Abdoul Kader, Doubangolo Coulibaly,

Animal Diversity and Health Studies

For providing vegetation cover, feeding animals during the lean periods and thus reducing the external reliance of producers, research in partnership with producers has undertaken the introduction and development of the Brachiaria ruziziensis forage crop in the farming systems.During the 2020-2021 rainy season, experiments were conducted among 40 producers in 8 villages in the cotton production zone of Mali.The experimental setup was a scattered block where each producer represents a replication.At each producer, the plot was divided into 3 treatments as follows: T1 = pure Brachiaria ruziziensis; T2 = maize and Brachiaria ruziziensis association and T3 = pure maize.Biomass production was highly variable between treatments.It was better in T1 with a production of 6,489 kg DM/ha; it was 4,041 kg DM/ha in T2 and 2,637 kg DM/ha in T3.However, the analysis of variance did not reveal a significant difference (0.4821) between treatments T2 and T3 for seed corn yield.The yield was 2,066 kg/ha in Q2 and 2,347 kg/ha in Q3.This shows that the corn/Brachiaria combination does not significantly affect the yield of seed corn.Economically, the grossmargin of T1 (532,433 CFA/ha) was more profitable than T2 (469,246 CFA/ha) and T3 (343,578 CFA/ha).These results show that the adoption of Brachiaria ruziziensis is one of the means for sustainable intensification of agricultural and livestock production systems in the cotton production zone of Mali.