A dairy farm of Vietnam Dairy Products Joint Stock Company (Vinamilk) covers 685ha in Tây Ninh Province’s Bến Cầu District. It has a herd of 8,000 cows, accounting for 62.2 per cent of the province’s totals. — VNA/VNS Photo Hồng Đạt

TÂY NINH — The southeast province of Tây Ninh has gradually switched from breeding livestock on a small scale to farms.

It has 572 farms breeding pig, buffalo, cow and oxen and poultry.

Of the farms, 123 are pig farms with 209,575 heads, 48 are buffalo farms with 1,359 heads, 401 are cattle farms with 18,801 cows and oxen, 78 are chicken farms with 6.76 million heads and 30 duck farms with 167,300 heads.

The province has 26 chicken farms, 41 pig farms, and four beef cattle farms which have been granted certificates of Vietnamese good agricultural practices (VietGAP) standards.

Livestock breeding in the province has faced many difficulties this year but is still developing stably, according to the province’s Animal Husbandry and Animal Health Sub-department.

The province has bred 9,700 buffaloes so far this year, equal to 97 per cent of the same period last year, and bred 101,000 cows and oxen, and 250,000 pigs, up 13 per cent against the same period last year.

The sub-department, in co-operation with localities, has tightened inspections of the production and trade of animal food and veterinary medicine, and breeding, slaughtering and transportation activities to secure food safety.

It has focused on the task of preventing and controlling diseases in animals, poultry and aquatic species.

It has implemented this year a plan of supporting small- and medium-size animal breeding enterprises to improve management capacity and develop value chains for their products.

The enterprises are assisted with 100 per cent of the cost of the contract that consults and evaluates their capacity to develop linkages and value chains, but the support does not exceed VNĐ30 million (US$1,300) per contract per enterprise a year.

Tây Ninh is located in the southern key economic zone, has a 240 kilometres of border with Cambodia, two international border gates of Mộc Bài and Xa Mát, flat terrain, fertile soil and sufficient irrigation canals for developing agriculture and animal husbandry.

These factors have helped the province attract many large-scale animal breeding projects in recent years and develop animal husbandry significantly.

It has attracted 162 registered animal breeding projects since 2016, 113 of them large-scale.

They breed 9.4 million chickens, 959,000 pigs, 450 beef cattle and 8,050 dairy cows.

Animal husbandry reached a production value of VNĐ5.1 trillion ($2.1 billion) last year, up 10 per cent against 2021, according to the province’s Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.

Animal husbandry accounts for 19.5 per cent of the province’s agriculture production value, and the province aims to increase this rate to 25-30 per cent by 2030.

The province will create conditions for investors to invest in modern animal breeding projects that develop closed production chains. — VNS