This issue of the ILCA Bulletin includes an article on land nationalisation and rural land tenure in southwest Nigeria, a study of agropastoral herding practices and grazing behaviour of cattle in Nigeria's subhumid zone, and two articles on the effects of supplementing poor quality roughage diets for sheep and cattle.
The first article discusses the impact of the Nigerian Land Use Decree of 1978 on patterns of land holding and use in the cocoa belt of southwest Nigeria. The study showed that the system of land tenure prior to the Decree provided an equitable, stable and flexible means of regulating access to land, and that assertions about the shortcomings of traditional systems have been based on misconceptions of how such systems functioned. The general finding of the study was that the Decree has had little impact on land tenure and use, and has done nothing to rationalise the supposed defects of customary tenure systems.
The second article examines the herding practices of agropastoralists and the grazing behaviour of their cattle in the Nigerian subhumid zone. The present system of integrated cropping and livestock herding allows greater yields of food per unit area than either enterprise alone, but requires close control of grazing animals in order to avoid crop damage. As a result, herding periods are relatively short, which the author believes may be the cause of the low productivity of the cattle. The author states that development efforts should be aimed at maintaining the present integrated system while seeking to provide additional feed resources such as fodder banks.
The last two articles both deal with supplementing cereal crop residues. The first examines the effects of Trifolium tembense hay on the voluntary intake and digestibility of maize stover and oat, wheat and teff (Eragrostis tef) straw by sheep. While only oat straw could support maintenance when fed alone, when supplemented with trifolium hay all four diets were eaten in sufficient quantities to permit moderate levels of production. The increases in nutritive value obtained by supplementing the cereal crop residues with trifolium hay were comparable to those expected from treating the crop residues with strong alkalis. However, supplementing diets with legumes is more appropriate to conditions on small mixed farms in Africa than is chemical treatment.
The last article examines the effects of supplementing wheat and teff straw with urea, noug (Guizotia abyssinica) and trifolium hay on the feed intake and liveweight gain of growing crossbred dairy heifers. While there were differences in the effects of the supplements on feed intake, all three increased the animals' liveweight gain, with diets supplemented with noug giving the highest rates of gain. This study indicates that cereal crop residues can support reasonable levels of production in growing cattle when supplemented with urea and a source of protein, either as a forage legume or as a locally available oilseed cake.
Paul Neate and
Inca Alipui, Editors
ILCA Bulletin,
Publications Section, ILCA,
P.O.Box 5689, Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia.
