MILKING MANAGEMENT PRACTICES FOLLOWED BY DAIRY FARMERS IN NORTHERN TELANGANA STATE

Abstract

A field survey was conducted in Karimnagar, Kamareddy, Jagtial, and Peddapalli districts of Northern Telangana state of India to ascertain the milking management practices followed by dairy farmers and data were collected from randomly selected 240 dairy farmers from 24 villages of 8 mandals belonging to the above 4 newly formed districts through personal interview with the help of a pretested semi-structured questionnaire. The present study revealed that, all the respondents milked their animals twice in a day and followed most of the good milking practices. All the farmers allowed the calf to suckle at both the times, 33.75% of the respondents offered concentrate feed and practiced teat manipulation for milk let down. Most of the farmers milked the animals at the same place by using scientific milking pails and adopted the practice of drying off their dairy animals two months before calving. Most of the respondents didn’t follow teat dipping. Majority of respondents (99.17%) followed cleaning of milking utensils with tap water. Most of respondents sold their milk to village dairy co-operative society and none of the respondents followed testing for mastitis and sealing of teat canal at the end of lactation in their dairy animals. It can be concluded that, there is enough scope in imparting scientific dairy management practices to the farmers in the study area through training programmes and frequent exposure visits to organised dairy farms apart from providing them milk chilling facility in the form of Bulk milk coolers at village level.