RADA Endorses Silage App To Help Jamaican Farmers Calculate Animal Feed

A mobile application designed to make silage easier to plan and portion for farm animals has received the backing of the Rural Agricultural Development Authority (RADA), which treats the feed as central to sound animal nutrition.

Maxine Brown, Senior Livestock Specialist at RADA, built the tool. She said two applications came out of her work, though only the silage one has entered circulation so far.

“It’s a silage app because we constantly push persons to say you need to make silage because it’s a way to conserve the hay for animals during heavy rains or when you have dry times. But this app will also allow persons to be able to calculate what quantity of silage do I need,” she said.

The Agricultural Marketing Resource Centre describes silage as forage that is preserved by fermenting crops with high moisture content in conditions without oxygen, a process that holds on to nutrients and feeding value.

Speaking with JIS News in a recent interview, Ms. Brown said the newly built application, which carries RADA’s endorsement, works out silage requirements for cattle, goats and sheep over a period the user sets.

She has also paired the rollout with a short questionnaire aimed at gauging appetite for the feed on the open market.

“To follow the silage app, I’ve also sent out a small survey to see how many persons would be interested in purchasing silage if it were available, because this can be used to guide a potential investor who would want to go into silage production as a business to assist farmers. In the same way that persons sell hay, we can have more persons producing silage for sale,” she said.

The app cannot yet be pulled down from the Google Play Store or on iOS. For the moment, RADA offices are passing it directly to people who keep livestock.

“It is something that I’m planning to work on, hopefully by the end of September, to get it on the Google Play Store. But it is being circulated generally among farmers,” she said.

Livestock owners who want more details are being asked to check in with the RADA office in their parish.