Cattle farming: A trajectory of decline

Generally, the cattle industry, and in particular the BMC, is in decline. Cattle farmers in Botswana currently get poor deals as they only have access to two markets, BMC and local butcheries.Farmers are not able to directly access more profitable export  markets  such as South Africa, where both cattle and beef fetch higher prices.In 2003/4 agriculture contributed 2.3 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 70-80 percent of which was attributed to cattle production.

Statistics Botswana figures show that the cattle population has fluctuated between 2.5 million and 3 million.However, the commonly accepted estimate is 2.5 million cattle. Cattle holdings grew from  66,410 in 2007 to 75,937 in 2008 at national level. Evidence gathered by the annual Agricultural Survey Report suggests that cattle population increased significantly by 24.1 percent from 1.778 million to 2.220 million in 2008.

In the years reviewed, the traditional sector dominated cattle population. The trend shows figures  ranging between 2.0 million and 2.5 million, except in 2002 when the population rose to 3 million and  in 2007 when it declined to about 1.8 million.

Developing a new non-invasive test for welfare status

“Finding non-invasive tests for health, production and welfare of farm animals has been a top priority for research and the advent of genomics and molecular biology technology will help advance this important research area”, says Mingan Choct, CEO of Poultry CRC. Indeed, Anthony and Tamsyn are going to work with a number of established animal welfare researchers, combining traditional approaches and frontier science to search for additional objective measures of poultry welfare. Their idea is to use miRNA profiling as a definitive measure of a bird’s welfare status based on leads in other research findings. As Tamsyn notes, “recent studies investigating diseases in humans and other animals have shown clear differences in the expression patterns of miRNAs in the blood from healthy animals compared to those suffering disease.” Anthony added, “since miRNAs are found in human and cow milk, it’s reasonable to expect to find them in eggs. Therefore Tamsyn and I should be able to develop a technique to assess welfare status using eggs, and possibly excreta, non-invasively.”