Demand for dairy goats soars locally amid regional interest

Diminishing land size has created the need for farmers to look for domestic animals they can keep in small units while still maintaining productivity.

This has seen increased demand for dairy goats that can provide farmers with milk for consumption while they sell the surplus.

Dairy Research Institute (Kalro, Naivasha) director Evans Ilatsia said the dairy goat breeding programme has gained popularity.

He said farmers from as far as Somali and Namibia have been buying dairy goats from the institute.

“The dairy goat improvement programme is a more recent research and development programme that was initiated because the smallholder system is becoming small," he said. 

"Feed resource is becoming a challenge so you need smaller animals that can fit into smallholder system and utilise limited feed resource to be able to meet the needs of the households.” 

Ilatsia said the dairy goat programme focuses mainly in dairy breeds such as Toggenburg, Saanen, German Alpine and some crosses of those.

The World Bank-funded programme through the Kenya Climate-Smart Agriculture Project was started in October 2020 and will run till September 2022.

The programme seeks to improve dairy goat productivity and resilience in smallholder farming systems through breeding, multiplication, husbandry technologies and dissemination of superior breeds.

He said they are targeting to get dairy goat breeds that can produce at least two litres of milk on average unlike the indigenous breeds that produce about 400 millilitres of milk.

“This is just enough for the kid (young one of goat), but with a goat producing two litres of milk," Ilatsia said. 

"The kid can take a half litre and the farmer will still be left with one and half litres of milk for use or sale with a litre going for Sh80 while that of a cow costs between Sh35 to Sh40.

“We are going into serious selection programme focusing on adaptability and survival. These are key elements in building the resilience of farmers in terms of climate-smart [agriculture].” 

The director said the demand has picked and is rising, especially among individual farmers and private farms.   

He also said they have created a strong partnership between what they are doing at the institute and what the private dairy goat farmers are doing in Central and Western Kenya.

“The dairy goat unit we have also acts as a farmer capacity building. This is where farmers come to learn how to manage their animals in terms of structures and husbandry," Ilatsia said. 

He said last year they got orders of almost 600,000 dairy goats but they could not meet that demand.

Instead, they made referrals to the farmers they have been working with in Nyeri, Meru and Kakamega.

He further said there is a huge demand, with the programme attracting regional interest from countries like Somali, Djibouti, Eritrea, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

“The dairy goat programme has attracted interest because of the strategic position of the institution and the international connection,” he said.

Ilatsia said, besides the good price dairy goat milk fetches, it is also nutritious and people who are sensitive to cow milk can drink goat milk without any reaction.

“We also planning to go into a component of value addition. We are putting up infrastructure to be able to add value to dairy goat milk, taking into consideration the safety concerns," he said. 

"We want to be able to get into value addition research and new product development so that we can have a bigger market niche.”

(edited by Amol Awuor)