Ration Balancing Programme

“A programme initiated by NDDB to educate the farmers on balanced feeding of their dairy animals.”

Farmers feed their animals based on their traditional knowledge and information passed through generations with crop residues, locally available one or two feed ingredients like brans, oil-cakes, chunnies, grains etc. and seasonally available green fodders. They rarely offer mineral mixture to their animals or in a very less quantity of 25g to 50g per day. In most of the cases, the quantity of feed/fodder offered to animals is either more or less than the requirements. This leads to an imbalance of protein, energy and minerals in their ration. Animals on such imbalanced ration produce milk sub-optimally, cost of milk production is higher and it affects the health and fertility of animals. Therefore, it is necessary to educate farmers on feeding of balanced ration.

NDDB, has developed a software that can be used on desktops, laptops, netbooks, tablets as well as phones. With the help of this software balanced ration is formulated considering the animal's profile, i.e. cattle or buffalo, age, milk production, milk fat, and feeding regime etc. and milk producers are advised to adjust the quantity of locally available  feed ingredients offered to their animals along with area specific mineral mixture.

Achievements under NDP I:

The programme was implemented in 33,374 villages covering 28.65 lakhs dairy animals of 21.57 lakhs farmers across 18 major dairying states of India. Implementation of the programme resulted in increase in milk yield and fat content along with reduction in feeding cost. On an average there was increase in net daily income of the farmers by Rs 25.5 per animal due to reduction in feed cost (Rs 16.3) and additional milk yield and increased fat content (Rs 9.2).

RBP also resulted in increased lactation period (milk days) by average 26 days for cows and 50 days for buffaloes.

Besides this feeding balanced rations to dairy cows and buffaloes resulted in average 13.7% reduction in enteric methane emission per kg of milk.

RBP Impact on milk yield, fat percent and feed cost

Benefits of Ration Balancing Programme

• Proper use of locally available feed resources at possible least cost
• Increases milk production with more fat and SNF
• Increase in net daily income
• Improves reproduction efficiency
• Reduces inter-calving period and increases productive life of animals
• Improves the general health of animals
• Improves the growth rate in growing calves, leading to early maturity

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To make balanced ration advisory services available to a large number of milk producers a simple version of ration balancing software ‘Pashu poshan’ app is developed that can be handled by milk producers themselves. This app would help the milk producers in improving the productivity and reproductive efficiency of their dairy animals along with optimizing the cost of milk production.

Link to download ‘Pashu Poshan’ app on Playstore 

Ration advisories (RAs) for cows and buffaloes with different level of milk production