The Study On Forage Supply And Demand In China’s Different Areas And Suggestions

With the industrialization and urbanization speeding up, population exploding andcultivated lands sharply declining day by day, the current grain production capacity will not be able tomeet the huge potential demands. At present, domestic animals feeding on grain (mostly pigs) make up58%of the total animals, which is far higher than the world average level10%. Food crop is the mainfeeding source, and more than30%of the grain output is used to feed animals. This kind of animalhusbandry structure makes grain consumption contradiction between people and animals sharpen andthe shortage of feeding grain gradually becomes the main limiting factor on husbandry resourceallocation and output efficiency. The fundamental ways to solve the grain consumption contradiction areto adjust the agricultural structure, to find multi-feed resources and make animal grain consumptiontransfer to forage grass feeding. Forage grass is the important material foundation of grassland animalhusbandry production, and it has lots of obvious advantages when compared with traditional food crops.Therefore, it is very important to develop forage grass industry to promote China’s animal husbandryand fundamentally solve the contradiction that man and livestock strive for grain between each other.This paper focuses on what domestic forage grass supply and demand conditions really are andhow to promote forage industry. The study is on forage industry in China’s pasturing areas,semi-pasturing areas and farming areas, and makes forage supply and demand as the measuredindicators. Specifically, this paper multiplies every county’s grassland area by yields to get foragesupply, and converts grass-feeding animal stocks to sheep units according to agricultural standard, thenmultiplies sheep units by feed intake one year per sheep unit to get forage grass intake. As the feedstructure in different areas is of great difference, this paper gives four grass-feeding proportions such as100%,70%,50%and30%, and then multiplies forage grass intake by these proportions to get foragedemand, besides, calculates the gap between forage grass supply and demand. In the end, based onforage grass supply and demand situations in different areas, some specific and targeted advices aregiven on forage industry development in pasturing areas, semi-pasturing areas and farming areasaccording to foreign and domestic advanced experiences.The main conclusions are as follows: firstly, there is a great gap between domestic forage supplyand demand, which even tends to widen. At present, forage grass supply can only meet30%of thedemand, and the gap between supply and demand is55billion tons when grass is provided as the onlyfood for grass-feeding animals. Secondly, animal husbandry development should be based on forageindustry, and the combination development will provide forage’s economic value and improve animalhusbandry’s productivity. Thirdly, we need to bring different forage industry development patternsbased on regional advantages. For pastoral areas, we should strengthen the natural grasslands’ protectionand artificial grasslands’ construction, and set stock numbers according to grassland carrying capacity.For farming-pastoral areas, agriculture and husbandry development should be combined, and develop adiversified economy. For farming areas, to adjust the agricultural structure and boost forage and livestock industry develop together. Besides, good policy environment and industrial atmosphere arevery important for forage development. Therefore, at the end of the paper four suggestions are proposedhoping to be helpful in decision-making and academic research, which are supporting leading enterprise,encourage forage and livestock integration, innovating in forage cooperation organization and speedingup the forage industrialization process.