The Impact of Changes in Crop-Livestock Interaction in Banteay Chmar Commune, Thmar Puok District, Banteay Meanchey Province, Cambodia

抄録

Banteay Meanchey Province is located in the northwest of Cambodia with agricultural, tourism, and handicraft economic sectors. The main agriculture products were crops (rice, cassava and banana) and livestock (cattle, buffalo, pigs and poultry when water is available). In between 750-1,500 families raised livestock for cash income, field operation, transportation and oth-er uses. In the last few years, the number of livestock heads significantly de-creased because of the introduction of hand tractors, lack of feed, and diseases. The observation of such decreases led to a study focused on income flow through different farming systems, linkages between crop and livestock produc-tion and analyzing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and the huge challenges in the region. Appropriate samples were used according to spatial/grid-cell meth-od from Googleearth. GPS was used to identify the locations based on the grid-cell data. Many tools such as Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA and Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA), were included. Local authorities, relevant NGOs such as Economic and Social Relaunch of Northwest Provinces in Cambodia (ECOSORN) and Agricultural Development Denmark Asia (ADDA), agricultural extension workers and farmers were involved. The results revealed that there were two kinds of farming systems - with livestock and without livestock. It indicated that farming with livestock could produce much more income than without livestock because farmers could sell both crop and livestock production to the market. Moreover, livestock could be fed easily with crop residues. In most of the cases, livestock’s manure could also be used to fertilize fields. Although livestock pro-duction was economically important for farmers, the shortage of water and feed throughout the year and the existence of diseases discouraged farmers from rais-ing livestock in great numbers even if there was intervention from NGOs, local authorities, or veterinarians. Such conditions led most of the farmers to change to the use of hand tractors as a means of transportation and field work.