5. Goat Breeding: An Alternative to Wood Charcoal Production and Slash-and-Burn Agriculture in XTs

Goat breeding in southwestern Madagascar is extensive and suffers from low production rates due mainly to (i) long inter-gestation periods ^[59][60] and (ii) the high rate of mortality of kids reported by farmers ^[39][60][39,61]. Despite these limitations, goat breeding is an important source of income for farmers ^[17][55][17,43]. Indeed, goat sales constitute more than 50% of the annual household cash income in the commune of Soalara-Sud ^[55][43] and cover 15–29% of the net food expenditure on the entire Mahafaly Plateau (compared with less than 6% for food crops; [17]). However, the key question regarding improvements to goat breeding practices is: would this income incentive be sufficient to persuade the farmer to breed goats rather than to cultivate the land or to produce WC? Improved husbandry practices can indeed significantly increase the production of livestock and thus the income obtained from it. However, this improvement must be simple and not involve many changes in current pastoral/breeding practices. The batch breeding technique satisfies these conditions. It consists of dividing the herd into the following batches: (i) young and lactating females; (ii) adults (reproductive animals); and (iii) castrated males and culled adults. The animals from the last batch and the surplus animals from the second batch are intended for sale. The application of this breeding method involves oestrus synchronization to obtain homogeneous batches of animals and to improve the reproductive performance of the goats. Flushing, which is known to have positive effects on small ruminant reproduction ^[61][62][62,63], is a simple technique used to achieve this oestrus synchronization. Andrianarisoa et al. ^[60][61] conducted farm trials in southwestern Madagascar on the control of goat reproduction using the flushing technique. The treatment consisted of feeding young females dry cassava at a rate of 500 g/day/individual for 45 days in June–July, a period of calving, and the availability of a small amount of fodder in the rangeland ^[60][61]. Cassava is available locally, and dry cassava can be purchased at local markets at a low cost. The aim is to change the birth period from the dry season to the short rainy season when shrubs have leaves. Flushing significantly improves several parameters of goat reproduction ^[60][61], including the fertility rate (the ratio of the number of females giving birth to the number of bred females), the fecundity rate (the number of kids born in relation to the number of bred females), and the survival rate at one month from birth (the ratio of the number of kids alive at one month to the number of kids born alive). Thus, the use of this oestrus synchronization technique would enable 1.5 (3 parturitions/2 years) to 2 parturitions per year instead of 1 (goats in southwestern Madagascar give birth every 12.4 months on average; ^[60][61]) in addition to producing homogeneous batches of animals. Batch breeding expenses were related to the purchase of feed supplements for the dry period (dried cassava; USD 2.90/head/year) and deworming products (USD 0.15/head) to ensure the comparability of treated and control goat groups ^[60][61]. All of these products are locally available. The potential income from the sale of surplus produced animals increases as the number of bred females increases (Figure 3). The challenge is to manage both the increase in income from goat breeding and the number of young females, which is limited by the XT carrying capacity. The data on income from SBA are from Neudert et al. ^[63][64], who estimated the opportunity costs of conserving Malagasy XTs (Table 1). The income associated with SBA is equivalent to the estimated opportunity cost of giving up that activity. The data on income from WC production are from Neudert et al. ^[63][64] and Masezamana et al. [56], who studied the value of the WC production chain in southwestern Madagascar (Table 1). A simple linear regression from the data of Andrianarisoa et al. ^[60][61] (Figure 3) was used to estimate the minimum number of female goats necessary to obtain the calculated income from SBA and WC production according to data from ^[56][63][64][56,64,65] (Table 1 and Table 2). The mean annual income from SBA and WC production together, as a net of different production costs, is about USD 521 (=372 + 149; Table 1 and Table 2). Thus, between 15 (2 parturitions/year) and 21 (3 parturitions/2 years) female goats would have to be bred to produce the equivalent annual income to WC production. However, between 54 (2 parturitions/year) and 72 (3 parturitions/2 years) female goats would have to be bred to produce the equivalent annual income to that from SBA and WC production. This is twice or three times the average small ruminant herd size estimated by Neudert et al. ^[64][65] on the Mahafaly Plateau, which is 25 heads per farm. Thus, it is possible to increase the income obtained from goat breeding, which could replace the income from WC production and a large part of the income from SBA agriculture, but this would have to start with increasing the average herd size (from 25 to 54–72 head). These new increased herd sizes might lead to a doubling or tripling of the stocking rate in the XTs, which would entail ecological risks, and the increased income would be subject to socio-economic risks related to market and price instability, which are discussed below.