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Most countries, where food crises are now endemic, are in the dry northern belt from the Atlantic coast of Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia.
Livestock, managed in different ways, is a mainstay of these impoverished economics.
In fact, livestock is regarded mainly as a source of food, meat and even blood in the east, draught power, hides or wool.
But, in practice, these animals produce more dung than anything else, which is used for nurturing the soil and also for fuel. A healthy three-year-old buffalo, for example, may possess 60 kilogrammes in live weight in a year. During the same year, it will eat nearly two tons of fodder (dry weight) and produce more than a ton of dry dung.
When it is fully grown, meat production stops. But it continues to eat up to nine times its own weight in fodder each year, while depositing four to five times its weight in dry dung.
Fresh dung usually contains between 65 percent and 80 percent water. This is why wet dung production figures are three to five times higher than dry dung production ones.
Actually, dung production is affected by the diet and general health of the animals. A fat wellfed milking cow may weigh 300 kilogrammes and produce in excess of 1.5 tons of dung each year. A skinny undernourished cow gives hardly any milk and perhaps a third of the quantity of dung produced by a healthy nourished one. Cow and buffalo dung is relatively a good cooking fuel. When dried, it loses its smell, is easy to store and burns with a steady flame.
Its main problem is that it tends to produce a lot of smoke that can be irritating for the eyes, and when breathed in large quantities as in a closed kitchen, is unhealthy and causes respiratory problems. So, it is regarded in most countries as an inferior fuel, which is only used as a last resort.
In many countries, where there is a growing energy crisis, dung can be used for producing biogas. Such gas helps shorten the time spent in cooking and also saves the consumption of other energy sources, which have to be imported from other countries spending precious foreign exchange.
The manure produced from biogas plants is considered a better organic fertiliser by 20 to 30 percent than other compost fertilisers. In places where chemical feritliser is hard to transport, such organic fertiliser could be the only option.
Moreover, the residue sludge emitted from the plants kills the weeds and helps crops grow.
A version of this article appears in the print on April 22, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.