3.4. Household labour
In the October 2009 interviews, 80% of best-bet households reported savings in on-farm labour used for both forage and cattle management, with the remaining households either uncertain as to the impact or not reporting a change. Estimates for time saved were highest in Mertak, ranging from 3 to 6.5 h in the dry season compared with approximately 2–3 h per day in the other villages. This saving is attributed to increased and more accessible on-farm forage production, especially of more dry-season persistent species such as gliricidia. Mertak is a particularly dry location, for which it was a common and expensive practice to hire small trucks to collect crop residues from other regions several times during the dry season, was previously a common and expensive practice. For most of the Mertak best-bet households (seven out of nine), this activity has now been largely replaced with feed sourced on-farm displacing up to six truckloads of feed per annum and representing substantial savings in both labour and cash. This of course will be a season-by-season proposition with off-farm feed still likely to be required in poor seasons.
Freed-up labour has been reallocated to miscellaneous crop management tasks (e.g. weeding and in some cases, an expansion of the cropping area), rest, non-farm or off-farm employment activities or intensification of forage and cattle management.