Forage and Hay Crops for Somalia

[Grant]

Somalia has a monsoon climate. When it's barwako in Sool, they are starving in India. And the reverse. It's going to happen on a fairly regular cycle. Somebody is going to figure out that you can irrigate a bunch of one of these, cut and store it, set up a big feed lot, and when the next drought comes along, buy up all the livestock cheap.

Stored water and stored feed will save the herds and make somebody rich.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennisetum_purpureum

Elephant grass

http://www.wyorange.net/Drought/sorghum.html

Sorghum and Sudan Grass

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panicum

Panicum : multiple species

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfalfa

Alfalfa

[gurey25]

Its not in the traditions of the people to do this, and population growth along with desertification and changing climate has led us all to this..

We need someone from the diaspora to start this, once it is up and running the locals will run with this idea..

During the rainy season there is allot of water that is lost to evaporation, you have flash floods one week and then in a couple of months its dry as a bone...

With catchment dams and underground storage tanks you can store allot of water for this..

[anonymousfaarax]

The Somali livestock industry

The current model of the Somali livestock industry is simple and this needs to change. In the current model, greater revenues are to be achieved by selling a greater number of livestock and this is not sustainable, reliable or desirable. The drive to increase exports of live animals year upon year is creating unneccesary stress on our fragile ecosystem. We could quite easily be making the same amount of export revenue from selling perhaps half of the total livestock we sell now by simply adding value . This would relieve a lot of the pressures on our ecosystem and perhaps stop overgrazing, soil degredation and eventual desertification. Lets be honest, it is not about feeding as many arab mouths as possible to our detriment but about making money. Another strategy in which we could double or triple the revenue from this sector by maintaining the number of livestock sales but by adding value and integrating the supply.

What we need is a more sophisticated model of growth for this industry and to be precise what we need is value addition so that we can achieve greater profit (margins). We also need to vertically integrate the supply chain so that we can keep all the jobs created by the process of not only rearing, slaughtering and processing meat but also spin-off industries and related products and by-products and so as to cut out the middle man (ME) whenever possible. Currently Somali livestock is slaughtered and processed in the middle east and they make money and benefit from jobs related to by-products such as hides and skins, leather etc. One neccesary component for success will be access to market and proper branding and marketing. So far Burco is at the forefront of modernising the Somali Livestock Industry.

This strategy could be applied to many of the commodities and industries Somalis trade in e.g. Frankincense and Mirr. If this trategy was followed we could easily create many new jobs, tax revenue and better living standards for our people.

The major players in the industry (domestic and foreign) will try to resist any change to the model of which they have become rich as they will want to maintain their stranglehold on the market and this needs to be factored into any strategy to develop this sector.

If only I had the money