Animal based smallholding farms in developing countries with special reference to Bangladesh 【Review】

Small farm systems combining crop and animals are the important categories especially inBangladesh. The value of crop-animal systems lies in their positive contribution to sustainability andeconomic growth. A central goal of the small farm is to generate a minimum target income and a sus-tainable system. These types of small scale farming are widely practiced in South East Asia and EastAsia as for example China, Indonesia, Vietnam, where animal production is integrated with fish farmingand vegetable production. Increasing population pressure in Bangladesh results in progressively smalleragricultural holdings and traditional grazing areas are taken over for crop production. The productionsystems in Bangladesh are characterized with small litter size or flocks, no or minimal inputs, low out-puts and periodic destruction of animals by disease. Typically the litter size or flocks are small in num-ber with each household containing 2-3 cattle and 7-10 poultry. Animals are owned by individual house-holds and mostly maintained under a scavenging system with little or no inputs for housing, feeding orhealth care. Under the prevailing situation in Bangladesh like other developing countries, the introduc-tion of more productive integrated intensive farming systems is imperative. Maximum sustainable pro-ductivity can only be achieved by integrating intensive livestock and poultry keeping with crop produc-tion and agroforestry. Farmers consciously diversify the use of their resources to produce mix activities,which are economically rewarding and highly stable. As such in small-scale farms in the tropical coun-tries, cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, chicken, ducks are commonly reared in combination with mixed crop-ping.