JABNDE

The Jabnde tool was designed for African family dairy farms. It allows a technician to co-design balanced, economically viable, socially acceptable, and low-CH4 individual rations with a farmer. It allows rations to be developed based on free-range feeding and/or cut-and-carry feeding. Rations are calculated based on an individual description of each cow (genetic type, live weight, gestation and lactation stage, movement, milk production), allowing for the calculation of its intake capacity and energy, protein, and water requirements, and on a selection of feed resources from a database of nearly 500 feed resources (rangeland, forages, and concentrates). It requires little input data, and the ration sheet allows for manual balancing of individual rations while optimizing their costs, which is particularly important for use in field advisory services. The tool has been tested in Senegal, Burkina Faso, and Madagascar as part of the Africa-Milk project.