SI FAT TAILED SHEEP Fat-tailed sheep in Indonesia; an essential resource for smallholders Henk Mathijs Johannes Udo & I. Gede Suparta Budisatria Accepted: 12 April 2011 / Published online: 27 April 2011 # The Author(s) 2011. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com AbstractThis paper discusses the historical development of fat-tailed sheep in Indonesia, the dynamics of production systems, production and reproduction performances under farmers’ conditions, and roles of sheep in livelihoods. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, fat-tailed sheep from southwest Asia and Africander sheep from South Africa were introduced. Crossing of fat-tailed sheep with the local thin-tailed sheep produced the Javanese fat-tailed sheep. Main motivesfor thegradualchange-over to fat-tailed sheep have been their potential largerbody size and the preferenceofconsumers for their meat.Management systems are changing in response to the intensification of land use. The reproductive performances of fat-tailed sheep are good.Households keep fourto six animals, housed close to the family quarters. This results in very high levels of faecal bacteria contamination of drinking water sources. Sheep provide a small income, manure, security and help to accumulate capital. Sheep also play a key role in religious festivities. Farmers hardly profit from the increased demand for the feast of sacrifice; animals are sold mainly when the owners have urgent cash needs. Systematic sheep fattening can contribute to highereconomicresults,if sufficient family labour and crop residues are available. Keywords Java . Livelihoods . Production . Religious festivities . Reproduction . Sheep Introduction In SouthEast Asia, Indonesiahas the largestsmall ruminantpopulation. Smallruminantdevelopment pro- grammes started about 90 years ago. At thattime,there were about 2 million small ruminants (Barwegen 2005). At present, there are 15.7 million goats and 10.5 million shee (Anonymous 2006). The increase in human population is a majordriver for the increasein the small ruminant population. The majority of the sheep are fat-tailed sheep. They have gradually replaced the native thin-tailed sheep About 90% of the sheep are on the island of Java, a dense populated island with intensive cropping systems. Mason (1978) concluded that the sheep of Java are an invaluable geneticresource, which should betreasured fortheir adaptation to a difficult environment and for their high rat of reproduction. Nearly 99% ofsmallruminants are in hand of small- holders (Knipscheer et al. 1984; Soedjana 1993). They are easy to manage, have a ready market, act as a savings account in case farmers have urgent cash requirements, havesocio-cultural rolesand they producemanureto fertilise the land (Soedjana et al. 1988;Devendra 2002; Sarwono et al. 1993;Subandriyo 1998). The Indonesian government promotes intensification of small ruminant production to increase the animalprotein consumption and to improve the income–situation of rural households. Agro-ecological conditions are believed to have an impor- tant impact on the type of small ruminants kept. Sheep are said to be suitable for the lowlands with some grazing area and cropping systems dominated by rice and cassava. This givesfarmersaccessto rice bran and cassava peelings. Sheep are considered to be the best choice to utilise these crop residues. Policy-makers and farmersperceivethat goats need better quality feeds than sheep and that goats H. M. J. Udo (*) Animal Production Systems Group, Wageningen University, PO Box 338, 6700 AH Wageningen, The Netherlands e-mail: henk.udo@wur.nl I. G. S. Budisatria Faculty of Animal Science, Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia e-mail: budisatria1968@yahoo.com Trop Anim Health Prod (2011) 43:1411–1418 DOI 10.1007/s11250-011-9872-7