Adoption Level of Dairy Farmers Regarding Clean Milk Production Practices at Field Level in Western U. P.

The challenge before the dairy farmers is how well they can manage the livestock to enhance the raw milk quality on a sustained basis. Therefore, efficient use of resources depends to greater extent on how they acquire and adopt innovations in the sector of animal husbandry in effective manner to reach higher level of performance. The milk quality is determined by aspects of composition and hygiene of milk. Dairy farmer is the key client in this process who decides the quality of milk. The study was conducted to know the adoption level of dairy farmers regarding clean milk production practices in four milk unions of western Uttar Pradesh in the year 2008-09. A total of 120 respondents (60 CMP and 60 N-CMP) were interviewed from four said milk unions. In each milk union 30 selected dairy farmers were again divided in two groups i.e.,15 farmers of CMP and 15 farmers of N-CMP programme under dairy co-operative society such type of distribution of sample size was done for assessing the comparison between CMP and N-CMP programme villages. It was observed that 58.33 per cent and 53.33 per cent had medium level of overall adoption, 13.33 per cent and 26.67 per cent of them having low level of overall adoption, while 28.33 per cent and 20 per cent of the respondents had high level of overall adoption, under CMP and N-CMP, respectively. The results in study clearly showed that milk quality at all levels of milk collection i.e. pail level (milk sample collected at the time of milking), DCS level (milk sample collected at dairy co-operative society) and dock level (milk sample collected at dairy plant) level was positively correlated with adoption level of dairy farmers regarding CMP practices. Therefore, raising adoption of clean milk production practices are of paramount importance for dairy farmers. This will open up new vistas and make possible for dairy farmers to achieve substantial gains in income. Raising the clean milk production is the fundamental problem. This problem needs to be carefully tackled for long run resolution of under developed animal husbandry.