What a 2004 Chhattisgarh Study Found About Manual Fodder Cutting

A small study, a striking number

In 2004, researchers studying dairy feeding practices in Rajnandgaon district, Chhattisgarh, surveyed 300 rural farmers across all nine blocks of the district, alongside 100 urban farmers for comparison. The finding: 99.66% of the rural farmers surveyed did not chaff their fodder at all, compared to just 6% in the urban sample (Deoras et al., Indian Journal of Animal Sciences, 2004).

This is one district, surveyed over twenty years ago — not a current, statewide number, and we won't pretend otherwise. But as the sections below show, the underlying pattern it points to has good reason to still hold true today.

Has much changed since?

There's no updated version of that study to point to. But national farm mechanization is still estimated at only 40–47% overall (IIMA, 2023; PRS India summary of a Parliamentary Standing Committee report, 2023), and is well documented as running lower in eastern and central states like Chhattisgarh and Odisha than in states like Punjab or Haryana. Odisha's own farm mechanization subsidy portal separately lists chaff cutters as a tracked equipment category — a sign the gap is still real enough for state governments to keep subsidizing it.

None of this proves an exact percentage for today. It's enough to say: manual fodder cutting is very likely still common on rural dairy farms in this region, even without a current figure to cite.

Why it's worth changing

Chopping fodder before feeding isn't just a modern convenience. India's National Dairy Development Board states plainly that chaffing fodder increases digestibility and reduces wastage. For a farmer doing this by hand with a sickle, that's real daily labour for a benefit a machine delivers faster and more consistently — especially as a herd grows.

Where to start: the Gokul 15 Electric

If your farm is still cutting fodder by hand, the Gokul 15 Electric chaff cutter is built to be the first step up — a single-phase 2HP motor, no tractor needed, sized for smaller herds and straightforward daily use. It's FMTTI-tested (report F/100/1453). Farms already running a tractor and processing higher volumes should look at the Gokul Tractor PTO chaff cutter instead — see our Electric vs Tractor PTO guide for the full comparison.