Central Highlands develops large-scale cattle farming

The Central Highlands provinces have transformed cattle farming from a traditional, extensive grazing smallholder system to a more intensive, large-scale production to improve income of many local ethnic minority households.

Workers feed cows at a farm

According to the Central Highlands Steering Committee, Dak Lak, Gia Lai, Kon Tum, Dak Nong and Lam Dong have taken the advantage of favourable weather condition and large areas for growing forage crops and launched a number of incentives to facilitate the development of stall-fed cattle farms.

The provinces now have thousands of cattle farms breeding more than 100 cows or buffaloes each.

Many smallholder families from the ethnic minority groups have no longer raised one or more cattle in the traditional extensive grazing production mostly for home consumption or asset accumulation.

They have increased their farm size to dozens of cattle with stall feeding and shifted to growing foreign breeds with higher meat yield, for example, Zebu originating in South Asia.

This has helped improve the efficiency and quality of cattle production, thus lifting them out of poverty.

Cattle farming accounted for approximately 81% of the total value of the Central Highlands region’s breeding industry and grew at an average pace of more than 7.1% annually.

It earned the region over VND25 trillion (US$1.1 billion) in 2016, with the largest earners being Dak Lak, Lam Dong and Gia Lai.

The region is home to more than 962,000 cattle, including about 862,000 cows.