Socio-economic status, sheep husbandry practices and morphological patterns of macherla sheep, a lesser-known sheep breed of Andhra Pradesh

A study on socio-economic status of Macherla sheep rearing farmers, sheep husbandry practices, and morphological patterns of Macherla sheep was carried out on 92 shepherds and 1279 sheep in Guntur, Prakasam, and Krishna districts of Andhra Pradesh and Nagar Kurnool district of Telangana state. The study revealed that 79.34% and 20.65% of the farmers had primary and secondary school education respectively with an average of 5.44 members per family. Most of the sheep houses were of open type (61%) with kutcha type of floors (80.43%). The average land holding capacity was 3.41 acres and the mean annual income of the shepherds was ` 1, 01, 043 with a range of ` 75, 000 to 2, 00, 000 and the mean flock size was 134.31 ± 4.60. The most common practice of feeding was grazing (70.58%). Major breeding season was July to September, while the minor breeding season was March to May. All the farmers in the study area immunized their sheep to protect them from infectious diseases and 79.41% of them followed a periodical deworming schedule. In most of the flocks, mortality of adult sheep was below 5% and in lambs 11–20%. The predominant color pattern was bi-colour of white and black (44.41%) followed by brown and white (35.65%), exclusive brown (18.64%), and exclusive black (1.88%). The most common head profile was convex (84.91%), majority of animals had pendulous ear pattern (96.79%) and 75.45% animals had wattles. Both sexes are horned and oriented backward, downward and forward. Further, 84.55% animals had slender type tail.

HIGHLIGHTS

About 75% of farmers followed both migratory and stationary type of sheep rearing.

White and black was the predominant color pattern followed by brown and white (35.65%), and brown (18.64%), and black (1.88%).

The predominant head profile was convex (84.91%) and ears pattern was mostly pendulous.