Agrotechnology

Malaysia dairy farmers understanding level on sustainability practices

4^th International Conference on Agriculture & Horticulture

July 13-15, 2015 Beijing, China

Nalini Armugam, Bonaventure Boniface and Zainab Mohd Karim

Posters-Accepted Abstracts: Agrotechnol

Abstract:

Agriculture sustainability is positively believed to deliver huge benefit to the farmers and society. However, in Malaysia, the sustainability concepts and practices seems not fully aware among the dairy farmers which result in low self- sufficiency level in milk production. The 6% of self-sufficiency in milk production leads to urgency of importing milk from other countries namely Australia, New Zealand and Holland to meet the local demands. This study intended to describe the dairy farmers understanding on dairy farm sustainability practices. A total of 167 dairy farmers were interviewed using structured questionnaires from six different states in Malaysia. The dairy farming practices that adopted by interviewed farmers were measured using the Likert-like scale. The mean score of the sustainability practices were determined and gathered data was analysed using SPSS. The findings indicated that the dairy farmers had a higher understanding about the farm sustainability aspect which gives the highest mean score of 4.52. The second highest mean score is the ecological aspect which is about 4.20. The mean score for economic aspect shows about 4.03. The social aspect of sustainability revealed the lowest mean score which was about 4.01. The results indicated that the farmers favour sustainable practice is farm sustainability system. The findings revealed that most of the dairy farmers were understand the importance of sustainability practices in increasing the self-sufficiency level. The involvement of government in handling land issue and introduction of new innovative concept in dairy farming positively believed to reduce the import bill of milk consumption.