Goats are globally important domestic ruminants being kept for meat, milk, skin, by-products and several socio-cultural purposes. While goats are one of the priority animal commodities selected for promotion under Agro-industrialisation programme of National Development Plan III to reduce poverty, which currently stands at 10 percent in the Albertine Graben, efforts towards its commercialisation are hampered by informal production and marketing, poor breeds, diseases and dry-season feed scarcity.

In a move to address challenges related to limited supply of producer desired breeds and information packages, BuZARDI established an on station semi-intensive Mubende breeding and multiplication farm.Further, the BuZARDI livestock research team collected production and flock related data for two years and computed flock dynamics and mortality rates with the purpose of enhancing precision of decisions aimed at increasing the farm’s productivity and using the approach to skill informal farms in future.

The flock size increased from 37 goats in July 2020 to 175 goats in June 2022. Average number of goats in the farm per month was 109. The mortality rate among goats in the farm over the period was 27goats per 1000 goat months. This is lower than mortality rate (51 goats per 1000 goat months) computed from a flock of 11,826 goats belonging to a sample of 271 farms in Albertine Graben.

The main contributors to mortality of goats were worm infestation (33 percent), fracture and injuries arising from stampedes (18 percent), Ticks and tick borne diseases (18 percent), respiratory tract infections (11 percent) and malnutrition (10 percent). To mitigate above causes of mortalities, the researchers recommend strict adherence to flock health programme; improved parasite management, separation and improved care for kids, vaccinations, safer feeding and evidence-based disease management， dissemination of formal records management and development of appropriate Application (App) for more accurate determination of mortality rates being vital indicator for evaluating farms management practices.