Adoption without survival: pre-weaning kid mortality is decoupled from improved-input uptake in smallholder goat flocks of semi-arid central India

Abstract

Context Goats support the livelihoods of landless and marginal households across semi-arid India, yet pre-weaning kid mortality remains a heavy and persistent loss. Extension services promote a package of inputs, mainly vaccination, deworming and concentrate feeding, on the assumption that their adoption improves kid survival. Whether that assumption holds at the level of the individual household has rarely been tested directly. Aims To characterise a smallholder goat production system in semi-arid Bundelkhand, and to test whether pre-weaning kid mortality was associated with, and predictable from, household management and socio-economic factors. Methods Fifty goat-keeping households across five villages of Datia district, Madhya Pradesh, were surveyed in a single visit. Herd structure, reproduction, feeding, housing, animal-health practices, disease and kid mortality were recorded, and 641 individual body weights were taken. Kid mortality was analysed against 20 household factors using correlation with false-discovery-rate correction, a kid-level logistic model validated by household-grouped and leave-one-village-out cross-validation, a beta-binomial model, and a binomial mixed model that partitioned variance among villages, households and within flocks. Growth was described with Gompertz curves. Key results Flocks averaged 29 head and were built around breeding does. Pre-weaning kid mortality was 35.3% overall, ranging from 0 to 100% among flocks. No factor was associated with mortality in the bivariate screen after correction, and a model containing all factors predicted survival below chance out of sample (area under the curve 0.42). Overdispersion was strong, and the fitted underlying household risk ranged from 4% to 79%. Almost all of the explainable variation lay among households (intraclass correlation 24%) rather than among villages (1%). The animals that survived grew well, with a median pre-weaning daily gain of 114 g and a mature weight near 37–40 kg. Conclusions Kid mortality was severe, clustered by household, and decoupled from the entire promoted input package, while the survivors grew at rates typical of improved genotypes. This places the loss in an early neonatal window rather than in the chronic nutrition of the growing kid. Implications Extension should move from distributing more of the same inputs towards neonatal husbandry and the micronutrition of breeding does. Adding vaccination and deworming to flocks that already use them will not reduce a loss those inputs cannot reach.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Animal Production Science, 2026 · DOI ↗