Don’t throw away farm waste, make dairy feeds

Patrick Nakholo with the feed miller he uses to make nutritious dairy feeds for his cows and for sale in Mumias. EVERLINE OKEWO | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • “Drying helps to improve the shelf-life of the feeds, making them stay for up to two years. It also helps to ensure the machine is not spoilt because wet materials will make its parts rust.”
  • Once he grinds the stover, he mixes it with molasses diluted with water. Three litres of water dilutes a litre of molasses.
  • Each of the cows offer him an average of 18 litres day, from five initially, milk that he sells at Sh50 a litre.

The green machine roars incessantly as Patrick Nakholo feeds it with maize cobs.

It wolfs the cobs and crashes them one by one, ejecting at the other ends tiny pieces.
Nakholo is a dairy farmer in Mumias, Kakamega County, and he owns the electric-powered feed-miller that he uses to make nutritious feeds from farm waste for his four Friesian cows and for other farmers at a fee. 

“With this machine, I no longer worry about what I will do with my farm waste because I turn it into animal feeds,” he tells Seeds of Gold as the machines roars on. Before he starts making the feeds, he dries the raw materials that also include maize stovers, cane leaves and egg shells for two weeks.

“Drying helps to improve the shelf-life of the feeds, making them stay for up to two years. It also helps to ensure the machine is not spoilt because wet materials will make its parts rust.”

One also has to store the raw materials in a cool dry place free of pests to control growth of molds and aflatoxin production.
The farmer grinds the raw materials separately, with maize stover and cobs being the main ingredients.

Once he grinds the stover, he mixes it with molasses diluted with water. Three litres of water dilutes a litre of molasses.
The diluted molasses is then mixed with stover in a ratio of four litres to 10kg.

The mixture is, thereafter, fermented for a day before it is ready to be mixed with other feeds to make nutritious meal.
A kilo of maize bran is mixed with 2kg of wheat bran and a quarter kilo of cotton seed cake and sunflower cake of the same amount and some little premix. A tonne of feed being prepared is normally mixed with 10kg of premix.

Stock lick salt, Unga high phosphorus, (which is rich in vitamins A, E, C and minerals such as zinc and folic) are further added to the mixture and it is then mixed thoroughly for about 10 minutes and then offered to cows.
Six kilos of fermented maize stover is then added to the entire mixture.

“These are the feeds I have been offering my cows every day for the past two years. They do not feed on grass or any other fodder like napier grass,” says Nakholo, who learned the practice in 2009 from an NGO working with farmers in the region.

“I normally buy 100kg. I also buy sunflower cake from Uganda at Sh40 and maize bran at Sh15 per kilo. The ingredients are cheaper there,” says Nakholo, who first bought the miller (initially a posho mill) at Sh220,000 from his savings and modified it into a feed miller at Sh90,000.

He feeds his cows three times a day, with each animal consuming 7kg of the feeds a session. The first meal is offered at 6am and the cows eat for 30 minutes, then he milks them and allows them to continue feeding until 8am.
At 11am, he offers them the second meal and they will feed until 3pm.

“I give them the third ration at 6pm and then milk them thereafter,” explains Nakholo, who milks two of the four cows that he bought at Sh60,000 each when they were still heifers.

“My animals readily accept the feed, digest it well as evident in their manure and give me more milk. This is how I am able to tell the feed is of high quality.”

18 LITRES A DAY

Each of the cows offer him an average of 18 litres day, from five initially, milk that he sells at Sh50 a litre.
Nakholo grinds the feeds for other farmers and for sale.

He grinds a 50kg bag of cobs and maize stover at Sh300 and Sh250 respectively.

“I usually get a lot of customers during the harvesting season when there is a lot of farm waste. In a day, during the season, I can grind up to 80 50kg bags,” says the farmer, who makes an average of Sh3,000 a day from making feeds for other farmers.  

He sells the feeds from Sh80 to Sh150 a kilo.

“I look forward to going into making feeds like dairy meal and pelleted meals for other livestock species for commercial sale and within acceptable standards to grow my business,” says Nakholo.

Tobias Omune, a livestock expert in the Ministry of Agriculture, Kisumu, says that sunflower is rich in proteins and fats while cotton seed is rich in proteins, hence, they are good for animal feeds.

“They should not be left out when making animal feeds. On the other hand, maize stover is rich in fibre and molasses is mainly rich in sugar. Of course a farmer who makes his own feeds saves a lot because the raw materials are locally and cheaply available.”