Beef Cattle Production

Drive out of any northern Nigerian town at dawn and you will meet them: long lines of cattle moving behind a herdsman, dust rising off the road as the animals head to whatever pasture the season has left standing. That single picture is Nigeria's beef industry in miniature, still built mainly on herding rather than on the fenced ranches and feedlots that supply beef in many other countries. Cattle move because the grass does not stay put and because a wide belt of the country remains too infested with tsetse fly for a Zebu-type animal to survive.

In this lesson you will meet the three breeds behind Nigerian beef, White Fulani, Sokoto Gudali and Muturu, and see how each breed's build fits the land it is kept on. You will compare the extensive, ranching and feedlot systems that turn a growing animal into marketable beef, work through the management and cost calculations examiners set on this topic, and learn the factors, disease chief among them, that hold Nigerian beef production back from its full potential.