Livestock farmers throughout the country, particularly beef cattle farmers are being told to meet certain requirements to be eligible for stockyard assistance.
This was relayed to Beef Extension Programme recipients in Vanua Levu and the Central Division by Minister for Agriculture, Waterways and Environment, Dr Mahendra Reddy, to incentivise these current smallholder livestock beef cattle farmers to work towards becoming large holding beef farmers.
Minister Reddy said the Ministry would be distributing 260 beef fencing materials to individual farmers in the hope that at least 50 per cent of these farmers make the successful transition to fully commercial beef farmer status.
"In return, if you are successful, we will give you additional coils of barbed wire next year and we will build a stockyard worth about $7,000 on your farms."
He elaborated on the checklist the Ministry would employ to determine the farmers' success under the programme.
"Are you looking at the herd situation, what is the quality, what is the health status? Have you established a separate account, an investment account? Are you accounting for every herd and ensuring that you are putting money in a separate account. These are some critical indicators that we will want to see this, what is happening to herd size, etc," he said.
Minister Reddy said it was the Ministry's goal to improve the stock herd in the country as continuous inbreeding of cattle had led to the loss of their original genetic makeup.
"We want to give you the breed that we have imported from Australia, either through getting a breeder to your farm or through artificial insemination that we have started, which is happening on the ground, or through embryo transfer which will take a bit of time but we are ready with the first two."
"We have the breeders and we are doing line breeding as well, we are also doing artificial insemination. That’s the kind of breed we want, look at the carcass content, not the one that we have now which due to inbreeding, we have lost the carcass size, so that’s the kind of investment we want to make but we don’t want to make this kind of investment and get our breeders to farms that are infected with Tuberculosis."
"And where the fences are broken and there is no interest from the farmers, we don’t want to waste our time and resources on these types of farmers, we’ve got a limited stock of this Senepol breed that we have, so the ball is in your court now, if you want additional support and stockyard assistance etc, then show us your input."
55 beef cattle farmers in the Central Division and 16 farmers from the Northern Division received their offer letters from the Ministry this week.