Author(s): R. K. Jat, A. G. Patel, A. Shviran, A. L. Bijarnia and Vanika Bhunwal

Abstract: Livestock population is the largest in the India, comprising 182.50 million cattle may be cow, 61.30 million buffaloes, 76.65 million goats, 41.30 million sheeps, 10.0 million pigs and 3.04 million other animals. The integrated efforts even could not improve the declining trend in per capita availability of milk from 263 g during 2011 because most of our animals are either low producer or under malnutrition and about 55.05 and 41.95 percent of the total cows and buffaloes respectively, remain dry and infertile. In India, about 6.91 million hectares of land which contributes about 4.4 per cent of the total cultivated area are under fodder crops cultivation. Out of which only 1.02 million hectares of land is irrigated. In Gujarat state, total animal population is about 18.44 million and their optimum fodder requirement is 42.2 million tonnes, whereas only 20.0 million tonnes of fodder is made available in normal year. Thus, fodder and concentrate production is not enough to feed the animals and there is a wide gap between the actual requirements and availability of feeds and fodders for the present population of livestock. Among the different rabi fodder crops, oat is one of the most important rabi fodder crop. Oat requires the cool and moist weather for germination, tillering, booting and heading stage. More over, oat make their best growth on loam soil in the state of Punjab, Haryana, U.P., Maharashtra, Orissa, Bihar, West Bengal and Gujarat. Oat grain makes a good balanced concentrate in the rations for poultry, cattle, sheep and other animals. Looking to the chemical composition on dry matter basis oat at milk stage contain 6.44 crude protein, 28.72 fiber, 53.20 nitrogen free-extract. Beside this, it contains 2.31 ether extract, 9.33 total ash, 0.47 calcium, 0.22 phosphorus, 0.22 magnesium, 0.52 sodium and 2.84 per cent potassium. (Sen and Ray, 1971)......

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