General Issues PRODUCTIVE, REPRODUCTIVE AND ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE OF DAIRY CATTLE IN BANGLADESH M.K.I. Khan, H.T. Blair, N. Lopez-Villalobos and P.L.Johnson IVABS, Massey University, Palmerston North- 11 222, New Zealand SUMMARY The dairy cattle improvement programme in Bangladesh aims to improve local cattle for milk production by incorporation of both tropical breeds (Red-Sindhi, Sahiwal) and temperate breeds (Holstein- Friesian and Jersey). The CCBS controls overall breeding programmes throughout the country, except for the Cooperative Dairy Production System. The productive and reproductive performances of different crossbreds have been studied by several researchers and they showed that the Holstein-Friesian crossbred performed comparatively better than others. An economic evaluation of dairy cattle in Bangladesh showed that the purebred and crossbred of temperate breeds had higher profit than other crosses but their survivability is lower than tropical breeds. Key words: Dairy cattle, Improvement, Productive and Reproductive Traits, Profit. INTRODUCTION Crossbreeding experiments have been conducted on governmental dairy farms in Bangladesh since 1970. The Central Cattle Breeding Station (CCBS) controls cattle breeding throughout the country and they maintain different genotypes such as Local, Sahiwal, Red-Sindhi, Holstein, Jersey, Holstein- Friesian crosses, Jersey crosses and Sahiwal crosses. In addition, there are some commercial herds around the larger cities like Dhaka, Chittagong, Rangpur, Khulna, Sylhet where herd size ranges from 5-100 cows. Commercial farms possess mainly Holstein and Holstein crosses (F 1 and F 2 ). A large cooperative dairy production system group, the Bangladesh Milk Producers Cooperative Union Limited (BMCUL), has around 40,000 small holder dairy farmers who milk Pabna cattle (a local variety) and its crosses with Sahiwal, Red- Sindhi and Hariana breeds. The majority of cattle in Bangladesh are zebu type (Bos indicus) and one to two cows and half an acre of land is typical. The existing breeding programme, as adopted from 1982, was (i) breed females in urban, semi-urban and milk pocket areas with 50% Friesian and 50% Sahiwal / indigenous bulls and (ii) breed females in rural areas with 50% Friesian and 50% indigenous bulls (Bhuiyan 1997). However, some commercial farms used 100 % Friesian bulls. The result of the breeding program was not satisfactory and was revised in late 1999. The main change was the extension of traditional farming and the use of semen of improved germplasm of indigenous cattle through the CCBS. Recently, BMPCUL has started their own breeding policy to improve the milk yield of their member’s cattle. There is a great shortage of milk and meat production in Bangladesh. The yearly milk and meat production in Bangladesh is 2.15 and 0.62 million tonnes but the national demand is about 11.04 and 6.4 million tonnes respectively (DLS 2000). This deficit could be overcome through proper and efficient planning of the whole industry and requires consistent and objective breeding decisions. The objectives of this paper are to review the results of purebreeding and crossbreeding for cattle in Bangladesh and to estimate through deterministic simulation the profitability of these systems. 124