Stray cattle /animal management in agriculture

Stray animal / cattle is emerging as a major challenge in agriculture specially in India. They destroy crop at different stages. Farmers keep running behind cattle and cattle keep running behind green farm. Farmers have to keep watching their farm to save their farm from attack of stray animal.

In fact, stray animal is not hazardous or harmful. Due to hunger it keeps moving here and there. It eats less food but destroy more crop due to movement. Sometimes it destroys mature crop then loses are high.

To keep their farm safe, all farmers stay awakened whole night to keep their individual farm safe. This problem can be solved at community level. Generally, farmers send animals from one village to another village. Animals of two three villages make a group of 40-50 animals. This group enters in a farm and destroy crop very fast due to movement. Instead of above action farmers can make a stray animal yard in every village. On an average hardly, there will be 10-20 animals in each village.

Generally, there is village panchayat land or some grazing land or some other public land in every village. If there is no grazing land, then at village level two or three neighboring farmers can make a animal yard on joint land. 1/2 acre land is sufficient for that. Now the question is food and take care.  Village can collectively arrange straw for cattle and water.

Benefit 1: If cattle are open and stray then generally they make 10-time loss of what they eat due to movement during grazing. Now these cattle will be feed collectively then these cattle will not make loss to farms.  

Benefit 2: Farmers will not have to make overnight monitoring of their farms. They can make a normal monitoring of their farms. They need not to worry for three four months

Benefit 3: Last benefit is the most important. These cattle will give nutrient rich manure in return. Generally dry straw takes 4-5 months to decompose totally. If the cattle will eat this straw within 12 hour it will convert into dung. This dung will decompose within 15-30 days and same material can be used in farms as manure.

Cattle are symbiotic in nature for farmers. Due to individual effort and poor management stray cattle seems a problem. If it is managed properly then this is not a problem. Community level problem is solution is beneficial for farmers. It is effective way to enrich the organic carbon and other micro nutrients in farm soil.