Vietnam is home to 75 million people and about three million cattle and three million buffalo. Currently, many of Vietnam's cattle are managed on a low-intensity basis, using mixed feed resources of variable quality. Labour input is high, with feed in the form of crop residues being cut and carried to the tethered animals. Untethered grazing on specialist pastures is almost unknown. (Fresh grasses and weeds are limited to the roadsides, field edges and small pockets of common land.) The growth rates of animals in these situations is low, and profit margins are probably slim.
The economy in Vietnam is now starting to grow rapidly, and demand for beef is likely to increase as incomes rise. Unless the productivity of its own beef-farming is improved there is likely to be a shortfall that will be filled by imports. However, if action is taken now to improve the situation, Vietnam has the capacity to supply most of its own requirements in the future.
An interdisciplinary approach is the best way to achieve this. This project will therefore investigate the physical, biological, social and economic aspects of the beef industry in Vietnam through a series of independently-managed sub-projects. Much of the work will involve research on smallholder farms. The aim is not simply to improve productivity, but to raise profitability - a different, and much broader, concept.
The chief goal of this project is to increase the profitability of cattle-rearing by smallholder farmers in Vietnam and thereby help to develop the beef industry there.
The research is divided into six sub-projects. The first is a study of marketing, and will involve interviews with farmers and stock traders to establish productivity and supply and demand. The second concentrates on profitable calf management. It involves calf feeding trials and growth monitoring under different village farming practices in various locations in Vietnam. In the third sub-project, the researchers will prepare an inventory of current forage resources, their availability and quality; this work will also establish evaluation trials of multi-purpose tree and shrub legumes.
The fourth sub-project will study the usefulness of sugar industry by-products in cattle nutrition. On-farm feeding trials will be conducted in Vietnam, with possible spin-offs for the sugar cane areas of Australia. In the fifth sub-project, scientists in both countries will review current breeding strategies and resources and monitor the performance of introduced strains crossed with farmers' cattle at a village in central Vietnam, as well as testing the responses of breeds to different types of nutrition. The final sub-project will concentrate on animal and human health. Village cattle will be screened for tuberculosis and brucellosis, which can be passed from cattle to humans. Researchers will sample for economically important cattle pathogens throughout Vietnam and will test carcasses and offal to assess the present state of health of the country's flocks.
This project sought ways to close the increasing shortfall in Vietnam's supply of beef from national sources by raising productivity of beef farming, looking for outcomes that increase profitability rather than just measuring productivity. Six key areas were studied: marketing systems, profitable calf management, beef production within intensive farming systems, nutrition, genetics and breeding, and animal and human health.
Project reviewers found that the concept of studying the beef industry in Vietnam in six relatively unrelated subprojects, united by a commitment to profitability, was over-ambitious for a three-year program. By the end of the project none of the components had reached a stage where the profitability of the technologies and concepts could be easily assessed. In addition there were few synergies between the component sub-projects, which operated relatively independently of one another so that the proposed interdisciplinary approach was not strongly in evidence. Despite these shortfalls relative to the objectives of the project, there were many positive results that had excellent social, technical and capacity-building outcomes.
Researchers described and undertook a preliminary analysis of beef marketing in Vietnam, showing that its market behaves quite differently from that in many other countries (including some other Asian countries), and this has important ramifications for future research at all levels of the beef supply chain. They also described and monitored the agronomic and cultural characteristics of a wide range of leguminous tree species of potential benefit in Vietnam.
The project team found positive evidence that by-products, particularly molasses, can cheapen diets for cattle without compromising growth rate and efficiency. There was also evidence that crossbreeding with exotic species could increase the size and growth performance of the calves produced. The team also assisted the veterinary services in Vietnam to develop for the first time its capacity to test for most of the important pathogenic viruses of cattle and buffalos.
Links:
[1] http://www.aciar.gov.au/country/Vietnam
[2] http://www.aciar.gov.au/programarea/Livestock Production Systems