Economic analysis of sheep and goat rearing in rainfed region of Haryana

Based on primary data of sheep and goat farmers of Mahendergarh and Gurgaon districts, the bio-economic traits and major constraints affecting the development and adoption of these enterprises in the state were studied. A majority of sheep and goat farmers had small herd size and kaccha house, were landless, illiterate, up to 55 years of age, untrained, adopted self rearing and of non-traditional caste as well. Herd size had positively increased with the category size. Lambings/kiddings were thrice in 2 years and number of lambs/kids per lambing/kidding was 1.11 and 132 in sheep and goats respectively. Youngstocks had greater mortality as compared to adults. Reproduction and production traits did not differ across categories, as by and large, farmers reared non-descript breeds. The annual returns to labour per sheep were worked out to be 303,292,37 and 303 in small, medium, large and overall average sample farms, while per goal these were 439, 446, 462 and 449 respectively. Fifty four and 43 units of sheep and goat constituted the respective viable herd size, which can uplift and lamb was 2.92, 1.74, 0.97 kg on small farms; 2.71, 1.69, 1.27 kg on medium farms; 2.28, 1.61, 1.16 kg on large farms and 2.64, 1.68, 1.13 kg on overall average sample farms respectively. The average number of days in milk for goats was 129, 132, 136 and 132 on small, medium large and overall sample farms respectively. Moreover the average milk yield per day was 1.04, 1.10, 1.11 and 1.08 litres on small, medium, large and overall average farms respectively. The factor analysis grouped 44 variables into 16 factors. Among these, 11 factors, viz., grazing, as well as breeding management knowledge and adequacy of product demand (7.4%), veterinary health service and domestic export market awareness (5.8%), quality buck/ram and kind nature of veterinary surgeons (5.3%), feed and fodder availability (4.8%), institutional credit awareness and borrowings (4.7%), development schemes and market information (4.3%), balanced ration knowledge, as well as veterinary surgeon's and/or clinic's adequacy (3.8%), adequacy of product market information (3.5%) and awareness of breeding time and market (3.1%) together accounted for about 50.8% of the total common variance.