Livestock sustaining intensive smallholder crop production through traditional feeding practices for generating high quality manure-compost in uplandJava

Information is needed on the biophysical and economic rationale for labour- demanding (and therefore, expensive) backyard animal rearing systems on sma llholdings in the uplands of Java where livestock have been an integral par t of highly intensive agriculture for centuries. The occurrence of high den sities of ruminant livestock is counter-intuitive considering the extent an d continuous nature of cropping on densely populated islands such as Java w here little land remains suitable for grazing. As a consequence, livestock are permanently housed in backyards and fed indigenous forages cut from fie ld margins and roadsides. Although cut-and-carry feeding is labour-intensiv e, it is surprising that farmers collect quantities of forage greatly in ex cess of the requirements of their livestock, In an experiment, indigenous f orage was fed to sheep at increasing rates: 25, 50 or 75 gDM kg(-1) livewei ght daily. The results showed that although DM intake and liveweight gain r ose with increasing offer-rate, the incremental improvements from 50 to 75 were non-significant (p<0.05) and <25 to 50, It is unlikely that farmers ju stify their excess-feeding strategies on the basis of these marginal gains in animal productivity alone. The rationale for excess-feeding also lies in the production of manure-composts. Group-interviews, involving preference- ranking and matrix scoring exercises, indicated that in upland areas, farme rs have an extensive knowledge regarding organic fertiliser quality and use . Farmers place value on the inclusion of animal wastes, particularly urine , into composts. In rain-fed areas, manure production ranked similar to mea t production in importance as outputs from the sheep enterprise. The resear ch demonstrates how livestock are traditionally used to produce high qualit y compost and provides evidence to support the hypothesis that integration of livestock into Javanese agriculture is essential to sustaining some of t he world's most intensive smallholder farming systems. (C) 2001 Elsevier Sc ience B.V. All rights reserved.