Juma Kiboi, the Dairy Farm Manager for Rawhide Ltd in Nakuru County, Kenya, has developed a molasses-based supplement that pre-ferments animal feeds to unlock all the necessary nutrients that would otherwise find their way out of the animal through cow dung, and dairy farmers have fallen in love with the product.
Juma Kiboi says that using microorganisms has allowed his farm, which includes hundreds of breastfeeding cows, to quadruple milk production without increasing feed costs.
According to Henry Ambwere, the Nakuru-based entrepreneur who created the organic supplement, naturally occurring pro-life bacteria aid in predigesting animal feeds, making it easier for the animal to utilize all nutrients, increasing body mass and milk production while decreasing the amount of dung produced by the animal.
When Ambwere introduced this product, we were a bit hesitant to take it up because Bio Food Ltd, which is our main customer, is usually very strict when it comes to the quality of the milk,” said Kiboi. “But he offered to try it on 10 animals, and in less than 24 hours, the milk volumes had improved tremendously, and further tests showed that the quality of the milk remained high
Juma Kiboi
The supplement, which is sold in Kenya under the name MolaPlus Livestock Microbes, is one of the most sought-after goods, according to Mercy Nyokabi, who owns an AgroVet store at Kiganjo Market in Kiambu County. This is especially true of smallholder farmers. Around one million litres of milk are delivered daily to the Kenyan market by Kiambu, the county with the biggest milk production in the nation.
“However, our laboratory examination of the dung has shown that the animals always fail to fully digest some feeds; hence, they end up producing cow dung that is full of energy and proteins and other essential micro-nutrients,” explained the entrepreneur.
All ruminants typically ferment the feed they consume during the rumination phase before sending it to a different chamber of the stomach for digestion, according to Ambwere.
“This is wrong because when we purchase animal feeds, we are actually buying energy and proteins to help the animal increase the body mass, and as well produce sufficient milk, and therefore we shouldn’t be disposing of important nutrients through cow dung,” he said.
However, when the microbes are added to the feeds a day before the animals are fed, they typically start the natural fermentation process outside the stomach, which releases the nutrients that may be concealed, for example in overgrown grasses, which the rumen might otherwise be unable to break down.
According to Bockline Omedo Bebe, a professor of livestock production systems and the temporary acting deputy vice chancellor for research and extension at Egerton University in Kenya, these microbes have the capacity to break down lignin, an enzyme found in plants, making previously unavailable nutrients accessible to the animals.
Lignin is a group of intricate organic polymers found in plants that play an important structural role in the tissues that support the majority of plants. Nonetheless, because lignin is difficult for rumen microorganisms to process, it is regarded in animal nutrition as an anti-nutritive component of forages.
“Scientists are also in the process of studying microbes from different wild animals such as buffalos, gazelles among others, to understand how they manage to use very low-quality fibrous feeds but realise outstanding digestion performance,” said Bebe.
The MolaPlus Livestock Microbes, according to Abwere, have been tested on extremely dried maize stovers and overgrown Napier grass, and they were successful in converting the fodder into high-quality feeds for increased animal production.
“At the Rawhide farm, we only use the supplement in the dairy meal. And whenever we use it, we milk 28,000 litres. But if we stop even for a day, the production goes back to the factory setting, which was 14,000 litres before we started using the microbes,” said Kiboi.
At the farm, the dairy meal is inoculated with the microbes and left to ferment within 24 hours before it is fed to the animals.
