Feeding a Growing Herd by Hand? Why More Dairy Farmers Are Moving to a Chaff Cutter
Chhattisgarh and Odisha are home to some of India's largest dairy herds. Here's what that scale means for how fodder gets prepared — and why more farmers are making the switch to a machine.
Two states, nearly 20 million cattle
Chhattisgarh and Odisha are home to roughly 10 million and 9.9 million cattle respectively, according to the 2019 Livestock Census (Department of Animal Husbandry & Dairying). Behind those numbers are hundreds of thousands of individual dairy and livestock operations — most of them small or mid-sized farms feeding anywhere from a couple of animals to a full-sized herd.
Every one of those operations faces the same daily task: preparing fodder. And a meaningful share of them are still doing it entirely by hand — with a sickle or similar hand tool, no cutting machine at all.
Where India's mechanization stands, in general
Nationally, farm mechanization is estimated at somewhere between 40% (IIMA, 2023) and 47% (Parliamentary Standing Committee report via PRS India, 2023) — two recent institutional estimates that don't fully agree, so both are worth knowing. Either way, mechanization is well known to be uneven across India: highest in states like Punjab and Haryana, and lowest in eastern and central states — the same region Chhattisgarh and Odisha sit in.
This is general farm mechanization — tillage, sowing, harvesting — not a chaff-cutter-specific figure. But it's a reasonable indicator that in this part of the country, plenty of everyday farm tasks, fodder cutting very likely included, are still done by hand more often than in India's more mechanized states.
Why chopping fodder matters
According to India's National Dairy Development Board, chaffing fodder before feeding increases digestibility and reduces wastage. In practical terms for a working dairy farm, cutting fodder into shorter pieces means animals eat more of what's put in front of them instead of leaving stalks behind, and it's easier to mix chopped fodder evenly with concentrate feed.
Doing this by hand, with a sickle, is slow, physically demanding, and hard to sustain daily as a herd grows past a few animals. It's one of the most common reasons small dairy farmers start looking at their first machine.
Where to start: the Gokul 15 Electric
For a farmer moving from manual cutting to a machine for the first time, the jump doesn't have to mean a full tractor-operated setup. The Gokul 15 Electric chaff cutter runs on a single-phase 2HP motor — no tractor required — and is built for exactly this kind of first upgrade: smaller herds, straightforward daily use, and a lower cost of entry than a tractor-PTO machine. It's FMTTI-tested (report F/100/1453).
For farms that are already scaling up and running a tractor day-to-day, the Gokul Tractor PTO chaff cutter handles higher volumes — see our Electric vs Tractor PTO guide for a full comparison.
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