Heifer Tanzania’s Alternate Training Methods: A Study Comparing the Dairy Cow Husbandry Practices of Farmers Trained in Their Villages by Project Supervisors to Those of Farmers Trained by the Liti Tengeru Animal Husbandry Training Center

This study was conducted in nine villages near Mount Meru, Tanzania between 14 April 2008 and 1 May 2008. The study question and methods were developed in conjunction with Heifer Tanzania. Heifer is a non-profit organization that provides dairy-cattle and other livestock to farmers in need. Heifer’s agents also provide training in sustainable farming techniques, such as zero-grazing livestock husbandry, and building contours. Some farmers receive this training in their village from a project supervisor, and other farmers are sent to a government facility, Liti Tengeru Animal Husbandry Training Center. The aim of this study was to determine what differences exist in animal husbandry quality between a sample of in-village trained farmers and a sample of government-facility trained farmers. The purpose of comparing these two samples of farmers was to provide Heifer Tanzania with information that would be useful in deciding whether to spend extra funds to send farmers to the government facility, as opposed to less costly in-village trainings. It was predicted that in-village-trained farmers would have higher average rankings because they were trained in a familiar environment. The study was done by conducting an observation-based survey of fifteen animal husbandry indicators at ninety farms, half of which were from each sample. The results of the study showed that some of the indicators had higher averages for in-village-trained farmers. However, a majority of the indicators had greater average rankings for government-facility-trained farmers; four of these differences were statistically significant with α=0.05