Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences
School of Agricultural and Food Sciences
Department of Animal and Wildlife Sciences
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
Animal Science has a longstanding research programme with goats. The goat was the first farm animal to be domesticated and is at present the most widely used farm animal in the world. In many species of livestock, the need to produce a uniform product for consumers and at greater efficiency has reduced genetic variability to a few highly selected breeds.
This is different with goats. Genetic variability remains vast. This gives the advantage of being able to farm with goats in many challenging environments ranging from tropical to the sub-arctic. Africa has 20% of the world goat population, with thousands of small scale and nomadic farmers dependent on goats for their livelihood.
Goat breeds produce a highly palatable product and it has been found that goat breeds can be selected for meat quality. Carcass and meat quality for local and export markets are an important research focus in the Department including work recently on Ethiopian goat breeds. Understanding their growth characteristics and combining these traits with feed from available local resources was the key to efficiently producing goat meat suitable for export from local Ethiopian breeds.
It was established further that in a resource-poor situation where grain is the staple food for humans, a grain-less diet could be used to produce meat with excellent palatability and nutritional value in a feedlot system. The fat quality was high in polyunsaturated fats with a favourable unsaturated to saturated fatty acid ratio.
The research on goats is continuing with the emphasis on nutrition for extensive production, nutrition for milk production and the raising of kids, meat quality of genotypes raised under different conditions, fertility, genetic markers for mohair quality and the effect of the interaction between physiology and dietary constituents on the physical properties of mohair.
The wide-ranging research programme is within South Africa’s National Livestock Strategy and is supported financially by the National Department of Agriculture and a number of other institutions including Mohair South Africa, the NRF and THRIP
Contact person: Prof NH Casey.
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