What Is the Breeding Buck Entrepreneur Concept?
Buck Entrepreneur is a Buck breeding facility service provider, who purchases a quality buck under the technical guidance and provides breeding services on a cost basis to small herd owning goat keepers.
Who is the Buck entrepreneur?
A buck entrepreneur is a person with progressive thoughts and a positive attitude (man or woman) who render the mating services of buck to the goats of the village on time. He obtains credit to buy the buck. The buck entrepreneur works as the local resource person in the reproduction of goats and makes aware of the best goat breeding practices to the goat rears with the help of Pashu Sakhi in the field.
Why is Buck Entrepreneur required?
Most of the goat rearers, rear 3-4 goats as a supplementary livelihood activity. Rearing buck for these poor goat rears is neither economically feasible nor practically possible. Since such goat rears are in large numbers (60 to 70% of goat farming families), the non-availability of bucks on time is a problem. In most of the villages, the low-quality scrub freely roaming buck is used for breeding which leads to low genetic quality in progeny. Studies in some of our project areas have revealed that 25% of goats are not able to conceive timely because of the nonavailability of breeding bucks at right time. As breeding of goats in an area is seasonal activity due to nutritional and seasonal factors, the availability of breeding bucks to poor families is a limiting factor for regular goat conception and kidding.
In some of the villages, the big farmers who rear goats in bulk, also rear the buck that is used by other goat rearers in the village for mating but there are social biases and caste restrictions apart from high chances of inbreeding. Sometimes, the young age buck (6 months of age) is used for mating because it lives free with goats. All the above-mentioned situations create the following problems
The goats are not become pregnant on time due to the unavailability of bucks. The heat period of goats passes without mating. Since the heating period comes generally after three weeks, the feed and labor of three weeks time get wasted. The kids are genetically poor due to the poor breed of scrub buck.
Since the bucks are not replaced on time, the goats give birth to weak kids and inbreeding depression is on rising.
The adverse impact on the reproduction of goats is due to the use of immature bucks. This is also important to understand here that the genetic qualities of one buck are get transferred among many goats, so the reproductive buck has more importance than all goats in the flocks.
The responsibilities of buck entrepreneurs:
