Yes you read it right Cows can eat Chocolate and it also helps them boost their production of milk. While people share chocolates this festive season with other people, the experts at Nanaji Deshmukh Veterinary Science University (NDVSU) in Jabalpur were developing chocolate bricks that could help poor dairy farmers increase their income via feeding cows chocolates.
Can cows even digest chocolates?
Yes, cows can, however, this is not the same for other animals like dogs and goats. Human and cow digestive systems can easily digest theobromine an alkaloid primarily found in cocoa and in chocolate which is not the same for dogs and goats and might even lead to their Deaths.
So how’s the NDVSU chocolate different from regular chocolate?
Chocolates have often been used by farmers in the western nations to increase the dairy productivity of cows however the chocolate made by the NDVSU is specifically customised to fit all the breeds that are found in the Indian subcontinent. All the ingredients included in this chocolate were carefully selected after a careful survey of all the cows found in the state of Madhya Pradesh and tracking down all the ingredients that they were deficient in.
These chocolate bricks also weigh only 2.5 to 3 kg and contain Jaggery better known as Gur as the natural sweetener.
Dr Sunil Nayak, who is the head of NDVSU’s Animal Nutrition Department claims that the bricks are primarily made to help the poor cattle farmers and he also stated that “Their animals don’t have access to high-quality fodder, owing to which they are forced to feed their animals on dry grass and low-quality straw husk, resulting in a low quantitative and qualitative yield of milk meat. The twin nutritional and mineral supplements chocolate bricks have shown during trials on ruminants to increase the milk-meat yield by up to 15% to 20%”.
Discoveries like these are surely a step forward in the right direction for Indian Animal farms.
