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in the field in both sites.
Farmers engaged in goat raising
encountered common problems in both sites
such as scouring, poor forage and housing.
The cited causes of these problems are
parasitism and bacterial infections, no enough
funds for capital, inferior quality of forage
and not properly designed goat housing. As
there suggestions, they recommended for the
following solutions: 1) enrich their knowledge in
goat management through training or “lakbay
aral” activities, 2) provide good sources of fresh
and nutritious forage, 3) better goat houses,
and 4) government will provide financial and
technical assistance.
On the other hand, farmers in both
sites encountered problems in crop production
like higher prices of farm inputs, occurrence of
calamities, outbreak of pests and diseases and
lack of capital. The causes of these problems
are due to high markup price of farm inputs
by the middlemen, typhoons and draught for
calamities, incidence of pests and diseases,
insufficient access to credit particularly coming
from the government, and not enough technical
assistance from local or national government.
The suggested possible solutions of these
problems are provide subsidies for farm inputs,
changing cropping pattern (from mono crop to
diversified farming system), apply right amount
of insecticide and other farm chemicals, and
government will provide more credit windows
accessible to farmers anytime.
Technology Options Adopted by Farmer-
Partners in the RED Project Sites
Table 1 shows the technology options
adopted by farmer-partners after a series
of capability-building processes conducted
in the project sites. After a year of project
implementation, results indicated that the most
adopted technologies by farmer-partners are
the provision of housing and/or improvement
of housing, stall feeding and the use of multipurpose
tree species as feed supplementation.
Out of the 20 farmer-partners in the 4 RED
54
project sites, all farmers (100%) adopted these
top 3 technology options. Other technology
options preferred by farmers include strategic
deworming, pasture development and feeding
of improved forage, upgrading and concentrate/
vitamin supplementation with 90%, 85%, 80%
and 70% adoption rate by farmers-partners in
focal sites.
Table 1. Technology Options Adopted by
Farmer-Partners in the RED Project
Focal Sites
* UMMB, Vaccination and Urea-Treated Rice
Straw are the less-adopted and/or not-adopted
technology options by Farmer-partners.
Provision of Housing/Improvement of
Existing Housing
Farmers confirmed that establishment
of housing provides easier and more convenient
raising of goats. With housing, goats are kept
under confinement or semi-confinement
system with stall feeding and concentrate
supplementation as a complimentary technology
option given the available feed resources in
the farm. Animals are also protected from
rain, adverse weather conditions, and natural
predators, and minimize social problems such
as destruction of crops. Mortalities are reduced
because goats have limited access to the
infective stage of the parasite usually found in
grazing areas.
Rural Enterprise Development Through Innovative ..............