Project Title: Development of a Practical Dairy Feed Rationing System Appropriate for Use in Developing Countries.
Description: Approaches to optimising diet formulation based on techniques such as linear programming (LP) have proved to be very effective in situations where one objective (generally profit maximization) is regarded as being overarching. However, they are of little use to many livestock owners in developing countries who keep their animals for multiple uses. Moreover, LP applications cannot identify near-feasible solutions that in many instances may be adequate for the user and more cost-effective. Although these drawbacks have been addressed by using a number of different mathematical programming approaches, each with its own merits, no single approach has been extensively adopted. A further difficulty lies in the fact that computer-based applications of mathematical programming techniques require an availability of data and a degree of sophistication on the part of the user that are unlikely to qualify them for field use in developing countries. This project aimed to address the need to deliver science-based information on ration formulation to dairy producers in developing countries in a format that is both user-friendly and effective. This led to the development of DRASTIC (A Dairy Rationing System for the Tropics), which is a genuinely usable, decision support tool for planning dairy feeding under tropical conditions. DRASTIC has a user-friendly design, it requires no expert knowledge of nutrition and the nutritional variables in the underlying model are assessed from simple indicators of feed quality, allowing the system to cope with variable feed compositions in the absence of quantitative data. Use of DRASTIC in an interactive mode with farmers in the field has shown that it can be very effective in predicting outcomes and designing modified feeding strategies for more cost-effective production or increased yield.
Partners: Federación Departamental de Productores Lecheros, Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Tanga Dairy Development Project, Tanzania.
Funded by: Department for International Development.
Status: Completed, March 1999.
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