According to Nigeria’s special adviser to the president on social protection, poverty in Nigeria affects an estimated 67 per cent of the population, that is 124,620,000 people, living without sufficient means to support themselves or their families. The majority of those people starving are rural dwellers. The best way to assist rural dwellers in Nigeria is to improve agriculture sector.
Grazing reserves in Nigeria are areas set aside for the use of pastoralists and are intended to be the foci of livestock development. The stated purpose of grazing reserves is the settlement of nomadic pastoralists they offer security of tenure as an inducement to sedentarisation through the provision of land for grazing and permanent water. In agriculture, grazing is a method of feeding in which herbivores or ruminants feed on plants such as grasses and other multi cellular organism’s such as algae. Linking the above definition with the word open we then take open grazing to mean the age- old practice of roaming about with animals in open fields, plains and nearby bushes in search of pasture or feed for the animals.
It is mostly practiced in Nigeria by Fulani herders who move for days on foot with their herds from the north to the more rain southern part of the country, pasturing their flock as they go. It is apparent that open grazing system could be said to be appropriate when human and animal populations were small and land was huge just as the system of shifting cultivation was appropriate then. But over the last few decades, populations of both have exploited, fallow periods have drastically reduced and weather pattern have changed.
Since change is a constant thing in life, some experts believed that changing this culture of primitive or every where grazing system has become inevitable particularly in a large country like Nigeria. As a result of low soil fertility the rate of arable cultivation is drastically very low due to frequent use of land. With the high rate of population in Nigeria the major rate of food cultivated are said to be from small scale Farmers(peasant farmers) which take the resident as rural communities, and this food provide by peasant farmers is inefficient to the satisfaction of Nigerian population. Most of the food for balancing diet in Nigeria are said to be plant source.
Cattle has an estimated population of 22.4 million population of cattle and 19.17 million population of goat and 15 million population of sheep. These are the most common Animals free from religious and cultural restriction. The amount of feed exhaust by a single cattle at any raining season of four month period of time is two and a half hectares of land though feeding take depend on the animal science and it function e.g servicing bull and lactating animal, they are said to consume more feed at a given time. with the total number of 22.4 million of cattle, the hectares of land required for their ranching 56 million hectares of land. The hectares requirement for sheep as a grazing land is 1.8million and that of the goat is 1.5million at a given season of four month of efficient growing of pastures.
The hectares of land to be exhausted by 19.7 million goat and 15 million sheep said to be 34.2 million and 22.5million respectively which shows that the amount of land in the country will never be enough for ranching only there which make animals to be sheep competitors of human in times of crop production. With the above population of cattle and humans, it is believed that they all compete on the same factor which is food and that causes the fatal clash between farmers and herders. The only way and the most qualitative approach to improve animal source of food is the modern agriculture or paddocking grazing with some supplement at every later evening hours as to avoid conflict between farmers and herders. It assumed the land is enough for the two agricultural practices which are crop cultivation and animal rearing, the nomadic system said to be the most easiest, suitable and leisurely system because in this system the expenses is very less considered to any modern system which enable herders to access local breeding but because humans also need to take part in crop cultivation, the above system is said to be complicated.
Ayuba Bitrus Bako,
Mass Communication Department,
University of Maiduguri
07019310300
