Health management practices of goat farms in Sandakan

Goat rearing activities are one of the main agricultural activities in Malaysia including Sandakan which aimed to meet the needs of the local population especially in terms of food supply. Goat farming is done intensively and extensively for high quality meat, dairy products and fibre production. Objectives of this study are to identify the demographic and socio-economic background of goat farmers, to identify the levels of understanding in terms of the proper practice of health management by the goat farmers, to compare the health management practices among the respondents and to compare the farm productivity per year among the goat farms in Sandakan. The processes of data collection for this study have been done after several visits to the farms and interview sessions with the goat farmers in this district were conducted. Descriptive analysis, factor analysis and analysis of variance or ANOVA were used to achieve all the objectives of the study by using SPSS software version 21.0. The findings of this study show that there are differences in terms of demographic and socio-economic background of goat farmers and their understanding levels regarding the proper practice of health management. For health management components, there are several differences in terms of health management practices especially in terms of feeding management, types of medicines used and more. There are also differences in terms of goat farm productivity per year such as in aspects of goat age for marketing, average sale per year and more. Hence, the communication and the coordination of long-term goals between Department of Veterinary Services and Animal Industry and the farmers should be emphasized continuously to provide a balance in development of goat farming especially implementation of proper health management in the goat farms and to ensure the supply of goat meat at the optimum level consistently