CHAPTER ONE
1.0 Introduction
Nigeria is an agricultural country with diverse vegetation, varying from rainforest to the Sahel. About 32.42 million hectares of grazing land and 39.41 million hectares of cropland in Nigeria provide a substantial amount of feed for the country’s livestock(Shiawoya and Tsado, 2011). The savannah zone is home to about 80% of ruminant livestock population. Availability and quality of feedstuff are major constraints in the development of the livestock industry in this region. Extensive areas of the grazing lands are composed of indigenous species, which are of low quality (Shiawoya and Tsado, 2011). There is a wide variation in the quality and quantity of pasture available from one time of the year to another (Adamu, 2015). Hence, there is need to develop or adopt strategies, or technologies to provide high quality forage for livestock in this region.
Several forage species, especially grasses have been introduced into Shika, Northern Nigeria and screened for productivity and adaptively over the past years. This has been in search of outstanding materials that could be used to partially or completely replace the low productive native grassland species (Whiteman, 1980). In some of the screening trials, Agishi (1978) on upland and Akinola and Olorunju (1990) on lowland reported some forage species that are well adapted to the Northern Guinea Savannah and produced a substantial amount of forage biomass.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.