Feeding Grasscutters in Ghana

The dry season sets the plan, not the rains

Ask a grasscutter keeper what the animal costs to feed and you will hear that the grass is free. That is true for about half the year. In the rains a grasscutter can live well on what grows at the edge of your plot, and young animals put on weight fast on soft, leafy shoots. The trouble starts once the rains stop, when the grass stalks up, drops its leaves and turns woody. The same animals that grew well in July can lose condition by February.

The Harmattan makes it worse across much of the country. Dry, dusty air pulls water out of every leaf, and the grass that is left standing has less food in it than the stand you cut in August. Farmers in the north see the same pattern on a different calendar. The lesson is that your feeding plan is really a stockpile plan. Whatever you want to feed in January and March has to be cut, dried and stored while it is still green.

Hatching and selling chicks is our trade, so forage is not our field. We do hear the same question from our poultry customers, though. Farmers who keep layers already plan their maize and soya around the lean months, and the habit carries over well to grasscutters. If you are weighing up a second animal next to your birds, the forage store is the first thing to test.

Forage that grows around most Ghanaian farms

Most grasscutter units in Ghana run on a short list of plants. Guinea grass grows in many soils, tolerates shade at its edges and comes back after cutting. Elephant grass, also called Napier, is taller and gives a lot of leafy bulk if you keep the stand young by cutting it often. Sweet potato vines, the tender tips of the leaves from your own garden, and the leaves of several legumes are used too. Variety matters because no single plant carries a whole year.

Leaves from cassava need care. Fresh cassava leaves carry cyanogenic compounds, so wilt them in the shade for a day or dry them before you feed them. Do the same with any new leaf you have not fed before, and start with small amounts while you watch the animals. Leucaena is a legume that many keepers use, but its leaves contain mimosine, which causes trouble when the plant makes up most of the diet. Ask your agric extension officer how much is sensible for the animals you keep.

Keep mouldy and sour grass out of the pile. A wet heap of cut grass heats and grows fungi quickly once the rains set in. If it smells sour or looks grey on the cut surface, compost it and cut fresh. Animals that refuse a feed are often telling you about the quality before you can see it. Poultry manure from a well-run pen can feed a forage plot too, and the poultry manure guide covers handling and timing.

Matching each forage to the season and the handling it needs

The table below sets out the forages most often used in Ghana, what each one does best and the mistake that costs farmers the most. Use it to plan your cutting calendar, not as a complete list. Your own pasture will be different, and the best guide is what your animals eat without leaving it in the feeder.

Groundnut haulms deserve a special note. They are good roughage when they are dry and clean. The same haulms, stored damp in a corner of the shed, can grow moulds that produce aflatoxin. Aflatoxin harms any animal that eats it, so if the haulms smell musty, do not use them, however short the store.

Cutting, wilting and carrying the grass

Cut grass when it is young and leafy. Many keepers cut before the grass flowers, because the leaf is then soft and digestible and the stem is still thin enough to chew. Cut to a stubble height of a hand or two, so the plant regrows from the base. Do not dig up the tufts for the pen. A stand that is cut back to the root every month will be exhausted within a year.

Wilting matters more than people think. Spread fresh cut grass in the shade for a few hours, or hang it on a line, so some of the water leaves it and the stems become less bulky. Wilted grass is easier to carry, sits in the feeder without heating and gives the animal less to sort through. Do not leave it in the sun all afternoon. Leaves go brittle, lose their green colour and give up some of their food value.

Carrying is the labour nobody prices in. A farmer with a dozen animals can spend an hour a day cutting and carrying in the rains, and more when the stand is far from the pen. Ask yourself whether you can cut enough for the dry months while the rains last, and whether you have a helper on the days you cannot go out. A wheelbarrow and a dry store are worth more than a second person who cuts when he feels like it.

When a concentrate earns its place

Forage alone keeps an adult grasscutter alive and, in a good year, in fair condition. It will not carry a breeding doe through late pregnancy and a litter at the same time, and it will not give a weaner the fast start it needs. That is where a concentrate comes in. Most small units use maize bran, wheat bran, a little soya or groundnut meal, and a mineral and salt mix bought from a reputable supplier.

Two rules keep the concentrate honest. First, look at the protein figure on the bag or ask the supplier for the analysis, because bran from the same mill can vary from one lot to the next. Second, store it dry and check it for smell. Groundnut cake can carry aflatoxin when it has been stored damp, and a bargain sack that smells of mould is not a saving. Many guides put the target for breeding and growing grasscutters somewhere in the teens of crude protein. Ask your agric extension officer to confirm the number for your region before you set a recipe, because the right figure depends on what your forage gives you. Bran and maize prices move together, so the maize price piece is worth reading alongside your own feed bills.

Mix the concentrate with chopped forage in the feeder, or serve it in a small dish that the animals cannot tip. Loose handfuls on bare ground pick up dirt and droppings, and some animals will leave the dirty portion and waste the rest.

Water and salt, the two things people forget

A grasscutter drinks more than the cut grass suggests, especially in the hot months and when the animal is nursing. Give clean water every day in a dish or drinker that cannot tip over, and scrub it at least once a week. In the dry season, check the water twice a day when the afternoon heat is high. Algae and droppings turn a water dish into a health problem faster than most farmers expect, and a dry dish is the quickest way to make an animal go off its food.

Salt is cheap and easy to give wrongly. A measured pinch in the concentrate, or a block set where the animals can lick it, covers the basics. Too much salt makes animals drink and urinate more and can upset their digestion, so do not add extra just because an animal looks thin. Thinness has many causes, and salt is seldom the one that matters. If you keep a mineral lick, put it where the animals reach it easily and check it weekly for damp and mould.

Water quality counts too. Use a clean source, a borehole or treated tap water if you have it, and avoid open drains or stagnant puddles near the pen. If you use rainwater stored in drums, cover the drums and clean the taps.

Feeding by life stage, with a table to pin up

The same ration does not suit a breeding buck and a weaned youngster. Treat the table below as a first draft, and revise it after two weeks of body-condition checks. Feel the spine and the hips with your hand. An animal that looks round but has no muscle along its back is carrying fat, not condition, and fat animals breed less reliably.

Weaners show problems first. Loose droppings, a dull coat or a sudden drop in appetite in a young animal is a reason to call the vet or your extension officer the same day, not after the weekend. Young animals can go downhill quickly, and a weaner that has stopped eating is in more trouble than an adult that is off its feed for a day.

A dry-season week on a small unit

Here is how we would lay out a week for a small unit of one buck and four does in the dry months. The assumptions are stated so you can change them. The unit has a shed for the stored hay and dried leaves, a fenced run, and a dry-season store cut in the rains. Your routine will look different, but the habits are the same.

1. Monday morning: check water, empty the feeder and weigh the leftovers from the day before, so you know how much was wasted.
2. Monday afternoon: spread the day's stored hay in the feeder, then top up with a measured portion of concentrate for each animal's stage.
3. Wednesday: check body condition on every animal. Note any animal that has dropped weight and move it to a closer feeding routine.
4. Friday: cut and wilt the week's fresh grass if the rains have returned, or count the stock in the store if they have not.
5. Weekend: clean the pen, check the store for warm spots or mould, and work out how many weeks of dried forage are left before the next rains.

The useful part of this routine is the weighing. Once you know that the feeder empties in four hours on a hot afternoon and takes most of a day in the cool of the morning, you can cut the waste that eats your margin. Keep a simple book with the date, the weight put in, the weight left, the weather and any animal that looked off. A notebook is cheaper than a vet visit that comes too late.

Storing dried grass without losing it to mould

Drying is where most dry-season stores are lost. Lay the cut forage on racks, or spread it on a clean sheet clear of the ground, and turn it every day until the stems snap rather than bend. In the Harmattan, drying is quick but dust settles on everything, so cover the racks at night and bring the forage in before the dew.

Store the dried material in a dry shed with good airflow, on pallets or raised platforms and well away from the wall. Stack it loosely, not in a tight block that traps heat. Check the store every week. A warm patch, a sour smell or a grey crust means the material is going off, and it should be taken out and composted before the mould spreads to the rest of the stack.

Keep rodents and insects out. Rats chew through bags and leave droppings in the hay, and both are a health problem for the animals. A simple habit of sweeping the shed floor and keeping the feed bins closed does more than most traps.

Where the feed money actually goes

Many keepers track the price of the bran and forget the rest. On a small unit the feed bill is a mix of concentrate, labour, water, losses and the cost of the store shed. Labour is often the largest of these, and waste is the easiest to fix. If the feeder empties in one hour and the animals still look hungry, the problem is probably the order of feeding and not the amount.

To see where your money goes, write down what you spend in a month on concentrate, salt and any purchased forage. Add a rough value for the hours you spend cutting and carrying. Then divide the total by the number of animals you carry through the month. Compare the result with what a healthy growing animal fetches at your local market. Current rates change, so check them in your own district before you decide. If you are comparing this with a poultry enterprise, our poultry business plan sets out the same kind of cost sheet line by line. We do not publish grasscutter prices, and any figure you see on the internet is worth checking against what the traders in your area are paying.

A practical test is the waste rate. If you put in one kilogram of forage and find a third of it still in the feeder the next day, you have paid for a third of a kilogram of nothing. Cut the portion, or change the feeder, until the leftovers are small.

Keeping grasscutter feed apart from your poultry feed

Many farmers who keep grasscutters also keep chickens, and the two share a yard, a store and sometimes a pair of hands. That is fine, provided the feed stays separate. Grasscutters chew through sacks, and rats follow the spilt feed into the shed. A bag of poultry concentrate that has been gnawed is a loss, and worse, a risk if the bird feed contains additives that are not meant for other animals.

Keep each feed in its own lidded bin, labelled and raised on a pallet. Never let the grasscutters share a trough or a scoop with the birds. If you buy day-old chicks from us, the chick and grower rations should be kept as a separate line in your store, with their own scoop. For the poultry side of the plan, our day-old chicks ranges start at GH₵20 for Ross 308 and Cobb 500, and you can see the current list on the price list for chicks. If you are growing your own poultry mash, the basics are in our poultry feed formulation guide.

Store the grasscutter forage and the concentrate in different rooms if you can. The same storage rules apply to any mixed rations you make on the farm. If you cannot, use separate shelves and keep the forage well off any surface that might carry feed from the poultry pen.

Warning signs in the feeder and on the animal

Feeding problems usually show up as changes in behaviour before they show up as weight loss. Look for these signs at every feed round, and act on the first one rather than the third.

• Refusing forage that the animals ate happily the week before, especially a change in one feed type.
• Loose or watery droppings, or a wet tail, in any animal.
• A hunched posture, a dull coat or a reluctance to move.
• Drinking far less than usual, or water that smells or looks green.
• Mould, a sour smell or a warm patch anywhere in the forage store.
• Sudden weight loss in one animal while the rest of the unit holds steady.

When you see any of these, separate the animal, check the feed it has eaten, and call your vet or agric extension officer. Do not guess at a treatment from a neighbour's bottle. Follow the advice you are given, and write down what you saw and when, because the record is the first thing the officer will ask for. Keep it in a simple record book, the same habit that helps a poultry flock.

Checklist for the first month of feeding

If you are starting a unit, work through this list before the animals arrive and again in their first four weeks. It is the same list we would want a new poultry keeper to follow, adjusted for a different animal.

1. Map the forage you can cut within a short walk of the pen, and note which parts of the year each one covers.
2. Plant or fence a stand of guinea or elephant grass, and cut it on a fixed schedule so it stays young.
3. Cut and dry a first store of forage before the dry season starts, and label the sacks or stacks by date.
4. Ask the feed supplier for the protein figure of the concentrate you intend to buy, and keep the bag tag.
5. Set up a water dish that cannot tip, and a scrubbing day in the week.
6. Weigh the feed in and the leftovers for three days, then work out your waste rate.
7. Check body condition on every animal at the second and fourth week, and write it down.
8. Ask your agric extension officer to visit before the first dry season, and agree on what to watch.

If you are building the grasscutter unit alongside a poultry enterprise, the birds are the part we can supply. Day-old chicks are available through our order form, and partner with us explains how farms work with the hatchery. Bring your numbers to WhatsApp on +233 24 915 1503 and we will answer the bird side plainly.

Questions farmers ask