The Rwanda Animal Resource Development Authority (Rarda), the agriculture ministry’s animal development body, will soon receive a shipment of bovine semen from Jersey Island. The semen will be used to inseminate cows given to local population under the "one cow for every poor family" programme.
The move is aimed at improving milk and beef production to boost household incomes. Plans have already been laid to obtain up to 84,000 semen straws – small plastic tubes holding frozen semen – to add to two containers of 16,000 semen straws received in September 2006.
“We are going to start receiving two containers with 16,000 straws every week for the next five weeks,” said Rarda chairman Theogene Rutagwenda. He said the increase in country’s milk production mainly results from artificial insemination.
Information from the National Agriculture Research Institute (Isar) shows local breeds produce an average of two litres of milk. The cross breeds produce 12 litres, whereas a pure exotic cow produces an average of 22 litres of milk.
Over 1,500 local inseminated cows have been given to the public under the "one cow for every poor family" programme. Its goals are to increase milk production and eradicate poverty. Rutagwenda said local cows have mainly been bought from Eastern Province districts, including Kayonza, Nyagatare, Kirehe, and Gatsibo.
But foot and mouth disease posed a threat to the process. “We stopped for sometime because of foot and mouth disease that was found in some districts of the Eastern Province,” Rutagwenda said. He said artificial insemination is done in two ways : People wait for natural heat to inseminate, while others use hormones to induce heat for insemination.
He said many farmers have been trained in the process. It is privately conducted, which makes the total number of animals inseminated difficult to estimate, but "the number of the animals inseminated using hormones can easy be monitored, as the hormones are procured from here,” Rutagwenda said.
Despite the underestimation of the artificial insemination rate, Rutagwenda maintained the number of artificially inseminated cows is increasing. He said this has lead to an increase in milk production from 130,000 metric tonnes to 175,000 metric tonnes.
The New Times
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