Livestock breeding practices in different regions of Malaysia

This experiment was conducted to investigate the livestock breeding practice in different regions of Malaysia. The objective of this study was to find out the general information on livestock breeding prevailed across different regions of Malaysia. The study was carried out under the umbrella of Faculty of Sustainable Agriculture (FSA) Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS) and covers almost every state in Malaysia except Labuan, Perlis, Putrajaya, and Kuala Lumpur. The states were divided into four regions; Northern peninsular, Southern Peninsular, Sabah, Sarawak. The data collection sheets were distributed to the second year students of the Livestock Production (HG36) program of UMS in conjunction to their Animal Breeding class. In total, there were 59 data collection sheet being distributed and collected from various regions of Malaysia. Two types of variables were Involved in this study. These variables were the independent (age, education, family size, and occupation) and dependent variables {involvement in animal rearing, type of breeding practice, and breeding facility service availability). Descriptive statistics were performed and analysis was done with the help of Microsoft Excel 2013. The distribution of respondent's location were 37%, 34%, 20%, and 9% for S. Peninsular, Sabah, N. Peninsular, and Sarawak respectively. It was also found that the pooled ration of bull to cow was 1:34, whereas the pooled ratio for buck to doe was 1:9, and lastly for ram to ewe ratio was 1:2. Study found that the number of farms practicing natural mating was 77.8% and the remaining 22.2% practiced artificial insemination (AI). In natural mating, 22% of the farm mentioned that the male for service was available at more than 3 kilometers away and for the farms that were practicing AI, 31 % of them mentioned that the service availability was difficult. These findings suggested that the number of breeding male was insufficient. This could lead to inbreeding. It was suggested that with proper systematic breeding and the utilization of Al, performance of livestock could greatly improve. The scope of extension work should also be re-evaluate in order to improve efficiency. Research institution should focus back to the basics with these farmers to help them keep up with larger scale farmers of the world. This research would be a preliminary work for execution of systematic breeding of future pragmatic research on animal breeding