Government expands artificial insemination program for dairy carabaos

The Philippine Carabao Center (PCC) is investing P100 million in the next three years to expand the coverage of its artificial insemination (AI) program that will hasten the dairy herd buildup nationwide.

The program’s main approach is to "privatize" AI services such that this function currently being done by PCC technical staff and local government units (LGUs) will be gradually transferred to farmers who will be trained as village-based technicians.

"The program will have a big impact on the income of farmers because it is sustainable. AI is the more logical approach to widescale genetic upgrading of native stocks to improve potential for milk and meat production. We are training farmers to acquire new skills which they can work on to develop new enterprises eventually. It will provide them with an income that could even be bigger than what they are getting from planting rice and vegetable crops," said Libertado Cruz, PCC executive director.

Initially, 2,000 village-based farmers will be trained on basic AI and pregnancy diagnosis.

"This is a practical approach since the farmers are already in the areas where their services are required. The government will initially be subsidizing them with an AI starter kit such as the AI gun, frozen semen, liquid nitrogen and liquid nitrogen tank. After that government stands to save so much in terms of salaries, transportation and other related expenses because this function will be devolved to the private sector," explained Cruz.

On the other hand, the village-based technicians will earn extra income from the AI fees that they will charge to farmers availing of their services. The cost of one AI is about P500. Even more appealing for the technicians, is that they will only start repayment of their equipment on the third year of the program when it is projected that they will be earning enough.

Cruz said the program’s target is to artificially inseminate 480,000 female carabaos annually in the next three years. Through AI, one crossbreed bull or "mestizo" bull which is a result of cross breeding local native carabao with imported Murrah buffaloes from India, could provide about 7,000 doses of semen which could be used to impregnate 3,000 to 4,000 females. This is significantly higher compared to natural mating wherein one bull could impregnate only 50 females annually.

The AI success rate is about 50 percent but since the current extent of the AI coverage is just five percent of the total estimated breedable females, there have been no dramatic improvements in recent years in the carabao population which stands at 3.2 million head. Most of these are swam-type animals used for draft-related activities. On the other hand, the Murrah buffaloes are the dairy type and cross-breeding the two enhances the potential for increasing milk and meat production.

Currently, the average milk production of a native carabao is only one liter per day compared with the mestizo which generates five to eight liters of milk daily. Thus, increasing the population of carabao could boost efforts to raise local milk production since the country imports 98 percent of its milk requirements.

The other components of the expanded AI program include beefing up the semen processing laboratory and will involve buying equipment related to processing and cryopreservation of semen from proven sires.

Two other critical components include improving bull testing facilities and improving liquid nitrogen distribution. The availability of liquid nitrogen in the field level is required to preserve the quality of frozen semen in the liquid nitrogen tank while an efficient system of distribution will be set up so that village-based technicians can have easy access to the needed semen.

The native carabao whose population has been rather stagnant in recent years, continues to be a major contributor in agriculture. Smallhold farmers own 99 percent of this important animal resource and the value of milk, meat and hide production is about P13.8 billion.