Gobichettipalayam, a small town in Erode, bordering Tamil Nadu and Kerala, evokes images of emerald green rice fields and rolling hills from the umpteen Tamil movies that have been shot in its scenic locales.
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| Shepherd Shivakumar (on the left) and Innovator Sudarshan (on the right) in discussion |
Now these idyllic plains and hills are also the setting for a quiet revolution that is happening in the lives of shepherds who frequent the area. Named after the Kurumbai breed of sheep that they rear, the Kurumbai Gounders are a community of nomadic shepherds who traverse age-old routes covering the region bordering the Erode district, spilling over into the state of Kerala on the west, and northwards into Karnataka. While earlier extended families owned herds of sheep numbering thousands, today the numbers have fallen drastically and the average herd size tends to be 750. Ewes have a five-month gestation period, thus producing two crops of lambs each year.
Butchers: Middlemen in the market
The shepherds sell three- to four-month-old lambs and selected ewes to middlemen, who in turn supply to the mutton markets. The shepherds retain some ewes as parent stock, along with the rams. Until about 10 years ago this system worked well. Even though it is probably true that the middlemen always exploited the shepherds by not paying true value for the lambs, the plentiful availability of grazing ensured that ewes got adequate nutrition. This in turn resulted in healthy numbers of lambs being born. As the ewes were eating well and producing sufficient quantities of milk, lambs fed well, stayed largely healthy, and steadily gained weight during the first three to four months. Even if the middleman cheated the shepherd, they could still make a comfortable living.
Today, however, the scene has changed. The continuous shrinking of grazing pastures due to industrialization, as well as their conversion into rainfed cash crop farming, has led to a drastic reduction in green grass available for grazing. The ewes lack optimal nutrition, and as a result the lambs struggle to reach the weight of even 8 to 9 kg in four months. Besides, lack of proper nutrition means their immune systems are not robust, and mortality is high. To make a bad situation worse, the shepherds face severe labor shortages. Thus, while faced with the need to cover larger areas to give their sheep adequate grazing, they do not have enough laborers to help them do so.
These factors have resulted in the creation of an unalloyed buyers market. Middlemen, often relatives of the town’s butchers, or butchers themselves, visit the shepherds when the lambs are ready for sale. They are experts at judging the weight and health of the animal, which they do by grasping hold of the sheep’s rump. After a quick check of its teeth to arrive at its age, they make their offer to the shepherd. Deals are struck for sheep pairs, with rapid bargaining for older or unhealthy animals. A healthy pair of lambs should fetch about Rs 1,300; however, the price paid often ends up as low as Rs 700.
Although the shepherds also have the innate ability to judge an animal’s weight and health, the middleman can easily cheat them by under-quoting the weight by a kilogram or two. As the sole buyer, he bargains from a position of strength. Socio-economics also play a role and the shepherd–middleman link often can be traced back to generations through family ties. A critical element in this whole mix is that the shepherds operate under perennial cash shortages. When they make their purchase, the middlemen also give the shepherds cash advances for the next cycle of breeding, thereby cementing their dependence through a clever combination of incentive and first purchase rights on the next crop of lambs.
Life on the edge
The shepherds live hard lives, trudging long distances with their wards as they graze, caring for them when they fall sick, and penning them at night. There are all sorts of issues. For example, leopard attacks are common. They told us about one that attacked three sheep and was chased off by the shepherds and their dogs. However, one of the sheep did not survive the mauling.
The sheep do not graze properly during extreme climatic conditions. During the rainy season, the presence of moisture on the grass puts them off. Similarly, during peak summer or winter the grass undergoes a change in taste, which results in poor grazing. During these times the shepherds are forced to cover a larger area to provide sufficient grazing.
GV Sudarshan comes from a family that runs a livestock feed manufacturing company in Gobichettipalayam. After graduation, Sudarshan returned to Gobi to take care of the family business. Realizing the severity of the food crisis for the sheep, he first developed an innovative pelletized food concentrate, using knowledge and experience from the feed manufacturing business.
To prepare this special concentrate, he uses extracts of cottonseed, rapeseed, peanuts, and sunflower. Added to this are grains like maize, jowar (sorghum), ragi (millet), rice, molasses, salt, and trace quantities of special minerals and vitamins. All this is compacted into pellets to increase the digestibility of the feed in the sheep’s rumen. This concentrate is fed to the sheep every evening when they return from grazing.
For the ‘lean’ months, Sudarshan has another product innovation—he mixes in ‘waste’ material like maize, jowar, ragi straw, and corn cobs to this feed concentrate to make fodder pellets, which he describes as a semi-whole feed. Farmers earlier had no use for this ‘waste’ material and used to either throw or burn it.
This semi-whole feed is given to the sheep during peak summer (May, June), winter (January), and rains (October, November). Not only does this compensate for the suboptimal feeding of the sheep during these months, it also ensures that the sheep forage over a smaller area. This means the shepherds can stay put in one spot for days, reducing the hardship of being constantly on the move, and of making and taking down sheep pens.
Lack of fiber-rich food was only a part of the problem. Realizing this, Sudarshan pioneered two other innovations for this community—access to veterinary care and livestock insurance, both unheard of until then, for nomadic sheep. The fourth and final element in his model is the buy-back guarantee that he gives shepherds. To prove his model and win the confidence of the shepherds, he offers these inputs—feed plus services—at his own cost, to be adjusted against the price of the sheep at the time of buy-back. Thus, the shepherds are at zero risk.
Sudarshan’s staff visits the flock everyday to monitor health and record weight gain. The itinerant lifestyle of the shepherds meant that previously veterinary care was difficult and insurance non-existent. There was no means of tracking the shepherds’ movements or verifying claims. With Sudarshan paying for veterinary visits and insurance, the shepherds now have better options than panic selling of injured or sick sheep to the ever-present middleman.
Price is now fixed in a transparent manner based on weight gain, at the rate of Rs 50 per kg. Doing away with the imprecise method of grasping rumps to gauge weight, this model uses a weighing scale, and the shepherd participates in the operation. In informal trials that Sudarshan has run with one shepherd, lambs have reached weights of 12 to 13 kg at the age of four months.
Sudarshan recovers his costs in two stages. First, he pays for 1 kg less than the actual weight to the shepherd. Thus, for a 13 kg lamb he will pay the shepherd Rs 600. Next, when he sells the lambs to meat processors in cities, he incorporates a margin that covers his expenses on feed, veterinary care, operational costs, and insurance.
Shivakumar, a local shepherd and an early adopter of Sudarshan’s model, is a rugged man with a ready smile. Full of anecdotes about elephant raids on crops and forest foraging trips, he narrates how he and a friend recently lost 70 sheep at a railway crossing. Apparently, the Kurumbai sheep have an irresistible ‘follow-the-leader’ instinct, regardless of consequences. Thus, when one sheep jumped, all the rest followed even though the train was upon them.
“Intha kurumbai aatto’du gunam ippadi thaan,” says Shivakumar in his lilting Gobi-accented Tamil. “This is the nature of these Kurumbai sheep.” And then he adds, with a mischievous smile, "and the shepherds are also just like their sheep. In three months, when the others see how my lambs have gained weight, they will all jump in!”
Anand Krishnaswamy is a consultant with the Lemelson Foundation.
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