A survey of Muscovy duck production in rural areas of Tra Vinh Province, Vietnam

In case of livestock development in the rural areas of Tra Vinh province of Vietnam, Muscovy duck breeds are diversified by importing and breeding, which is more valuable for social and economic benefits. A total of 7,921 Muscovy ducks were observed to collect data for this survey to identify the current status of its production, feeding, and performance. Farmers, who owned at least 30 ducks, were interviewed to analyze data ownership, feeding, and growth performance of three breeds relating to the Muscovy including local Muscovy ducks (LMDs), France Muscovy duck (FMDs), and Crossbred Muscovy ducks (CMDs). The findings indicated that most farmers kept a small duck herd of fewer than 100 heads per householder, and the majority of Muscovy duck was LMDs. Farmers fed them local feed resources, with low nutritive diets (CP: 7.35 – 12.0 % and ME: 11.44 11.83 MJ/kg DM). A small number of farmers used a concentrate feed (CP: 16.5-19.3; ME: 11.96-12.69 MJ/kg DM) for supplementation with the daily weight gain was 16.7 g for LMDs and 22.7 g for CMDs, whilw the FMDs was fed a better quality of concentrate and gave the daily gain of 25.7 g.


INTRODUCTION
In Vietnam, poultry production in general and duck production, in particular, is becoming the main sector in livestock production which brings income for many farmers, especially small farmers in rural areas. The Mekong River Delta accounted for a fifth of Vietnam's poultry population (GSO, 2017). Duck production mainly concentrated on Mekong River Delta and Red River Delta (Desvaux et al., 2008) and most of them is a small farmer in which the scale of poultry production is average 80 to 200 heads that made up 90% farm (Thang et al., 2011;GSO, 2017).
Animal genetic resources are essential for all future advancements and adaptations, and there is a global need to protect particular qualities for long-term usage. As a result, in order to adapt to future markets, production techniques, available feed supplies, environmental challenges, laws and regulations, and disease pressure (Yakubu, 2013), an understanding of the phenotypic, biochemical and production characteristics as well as the meat and egg attributes of local Muscovy ducks is a necessary need. Genetic improvement program has improved the productive performance of duck, particularly, Pekin ducks are well known as the main meat-type duck (Huang et al., 2012;Zen et al., 2016;Wang et al., 2017) or Longyan laying ducks as the main egg-type breed of ducks (Xu et al., 2014). Besides, Muscovy ducks are also popular, known as high breast meat, and adapt to various rearing conditions (Wu et al., 2014). Muscovy duck meat is more favorable than other kinds of duck meat in most consumers due to high percentage of meat, less fat (Parkhurst and Mountney, 1988;Adesope and Nodu, 2002), and the meat is tender, tasty and nutritious with 19,6-21% crude protein (CP) and 2,47% ether extract (EE) (Dong, 2005).
In the case of small duck farmers in rural areas, ducks are not raised properly, especially for feeding and watering. Farmers mostly do not focus on how their animals grow or how outstanding their animal performance is. Besides, farmers used local feed or agricultural byproducts from their surrounding house. The amount and quality of feed firmly depend on the availability of natural feed resources throughout the year. This study was aimed to clarify the status of the Muscovy duck production in small farmers, by describing the duck population, feeding, and growth performance in Tra Vinh province of Vietnam. The result study may be beneficial in further developmental effort for improving production of rural duck farming.

Location
The study was conducted at Tra Vinh province as one of provinces in the Mekong delta. The survey was implemented in three months, with prepared questionnaires. A total of 145 duck farmers was intensely interviewed to get data at farm level and household level. There are three districts, namely, Chau Thanh, Cang Long, and Cau Ke, in which the study is implemented because of the highest number of ducks in these districts. The activity of duck industry here can perform a great picture for the whole province. The map of Tra Vinh province including three surveyed areas is presented in the Figure 1.

Data Collection Survey data collection
This study applied a purposive sampling method to select respondents from the introduction and data of Department of Agriculture in Tra Vinh province with criteria: duck farmers, who owned more than 30 ducks, which included local or France or crossbred Muscovy duck breeds, were chosen. A total of 145 duck farmers were selected to implement in-depth interviews with the questionnaires, which were contained information about duck growth performance, duck All respondents read the questionnaires before interview to make sure there were no conflicts or sensitive information in the questionnaire. The discussion and sample collection were started when the respondent agreed.
The study used Vietnamese during the time of face-to-face interview with the criteria to collect both quantitative and qualitative data as below: Household level was surveyed to give information about economic efficiency between three breeds of duck and feed resources. Farmers who have owned more than 30 ducks were selected as respondents.
Farm level was conducted to show duck performance. Feed ingredients in each household were collected, then analyzed at Can Tho University. At least three samples were collected and sent to Lab to analyze feed chemical composition in the diet.

Laboratory Data Collection
Dietary samples were taken and stored in a freeze box, and all samples were used to calculate the actual feed and nutrient intakes of these Muscovy ducks.
Dry matter (DM) and crude protein (CP) (N x 6.25) were analyzed from feed samples by the standard of AOAC methods (AOAC, 1990) which were collected from respondents. ME concentration of the feeds was calculated following Janssen et al. (1989).

Data Analysis
Descriptive data analysis was used for this study by the procedure of Minitab 16.1.0 (2010). Feed chemical composition was analyzed at Can Tho University.

Duck Population in Survey Areas
The result showed that 145 households in 12 surveyed communes of three districts are small farmers (Table 1). They still raised Muscovy ducks traditionally. Cang Long district is one of three districts where the number of Muscovy ducks was much more than others. LMDs accounted for the majority of duck farming in three districts with 68.2%, CMDs for 20.8%, and the rest of FMDs with 11.0%.
Muscovy ducks were raised in small-scale farming in Tra Vinh Province. Raji et al. (2009) further argued that Muscovy ducks are particularly well-suited to scavenging systems and are more tolerant of hot weather than chickens. LMDs are also easy to raise, have a good feed intake and a great feed conversion ratio, and can adapt well to their surroundings (Dong, 2005). It led to many farmers are interested in raising these ducks. As the results of Halima et al. (2007), locally adapted animals are also more accessible to resource-strapped farmers, and they can be productive without a lot of disease-controlling chemicals. Furthermore, Vietnamese customers have a strong preference for product of native chickens that are well-suited to small-scale farming (Ifft et al., 2012) Most farmers have used most of their land area to focus on agricultural works such as growing rice, fruits, vegetables, and so on. To raise Muscovy ducks, they used the rest of the land area or just the empty space in their land area. Thus, they cannot expand their duck production scale. Furthermore, small-scale duck farming operations are frequently linked to other agricultural products such as rice and fish. Their impact on rice productivity is crucial because duck flocks, when being moved into rice fields for foraging and preying on rice parasites such as the golden apple snail, insects, etc. Duck flocks are usually classified as either fixed or nomadic, depending on how far they travel outside their farm village (Minh et al., 2010;Henning et al., 2013).

Plumage Characteristics of Ducks from Each Breed
Through the survey, there are three duck breeds that farmers raised on their farm that are LMDs, CMDs, and FMDs. Each kind of breed owns specific features. From Table 2 and Figure  1, 2, and 3, it could be distinguished three kinds of breed through their appearances such as their feather color, peak, shank color. LMDs have black color for whole body appearance with small white pots in body feather. CMDs and FMDs have black and white color on the feather; besides, they also have a black color with pots. It is easy to distinguish between LMDs and the other two kinds of CMDs and FMDs when looking at their feather color.
These ducks had a similar appearance to the Muscovy ducks studied by Raji et al. (2009), which have varying white and black plumage, shimmering plumage, and red caruncles on the bill and face. However, in the research of Oguntunji and Ayorinde (2014), predominant plumage was mottled; it is pretty similar to FMDs in this study. The different appearance between these ducks was caused by the interaction of evolutionary forces like as selection, migration, mutation, and various management and environmental problems that the animals have faced over time (Oguntunji, 2013). Besides, the observed phenotypic diversity in a population, breed, or species is the result of the interaction of evolutionary processes (Oguntunji, 2013). Additionally, the apparent variation in plumage color indicates that duck populations have not been domesticated by selective breeding (Bati et al., 2014).  Most farmers have utilized the available feeds which are available around their houses or their living areas to feed for Muscovy ducks (Table 3). About feeding method, the ducks were given commercial feed or rice, rice bran first after that, they were provided other feed supplements such as crop residues, vegetables or other kitchen waste, agriculture industrial by-products. Most feed ingredients were chopped into small pieces before feeding, then ducks were fed 2-3 times per day. Commercial feed is the one that farmers must pay, for others, they got them from their area for free. Natural feed sources are the most important for small duck farmers here.

Feed Resources of Muscovy Ducks in Surveyed Areas
Because it is freely to access and eat such as banana trunk, water morning glory, or water hyacinth, the use of natural feed helps small farmers reduce their feed costs for raising Muscovy ducks and get more benefits for their production.
Besides, ducks are easy to raise, can consume on leftovers, take less care, have high body resistance to diseases than other fowls. They consume more green forages than other fowls. This foraging ability shows that ducks can make greater use of agricultural byproducts (Tadjong et al., 2020).
The chemical composition of feed for duck breeds was analyzed and presented in Table 4. Feed chemical composition of feed samples from 3 districts showed that the nutrient value (was low. For LMDs, the nutrient value was the lowest, CP from 1.15-1.19 with 7.28-9.08 MJ ME. The FMDs were fed diets containing high nutrients (Table 5). Table 4 showed that the growth performance  Fermented rice --100 ------F: feed, F1-F3 (LMDs), F4-F6 (CMDs), F7-F9 (FMDs), 5 samples/feed of three breeds was different. The highest performance was FMDs with large weight at 13-weekage of 3,010 g and better daily weight gain of 25.7 g/day. The weights of FMDs were higher than those of other breeds, possibly due to their genetics and higher feed and nutrient intakes. The lesser the consumption of feeds, the slower the growth rate signifies overall development (Widianingrum et al., 2020). Depend on the availability of feed ingredients from their house and their area, ducks were fed without any nutrient analysis. Feed for FMDs provided more nutrients than feed for other breeds. It is due to more commercial feed in the diets. However, all feed compositions in three districts had nutrient composition less than the recommendation of NRC (1994) about nutrient requirement for poultry performance. Because the use of forages did not provide enough nutrients for duck growth performance. The recommendation of Zeng et al. (2015) for Pekin ducks was 19% CP and 13.8 MJ/kg for ME, it helped ducks improve growth performance. At least 18% CP was provided for Muscovy ducks for growth performance in finishing period from 6-12 weeks of age (Abdel-Hamid and Abdelfattah, 2020).

Growth Performance of Duck Breeds in Tra Vinh Province
The initial weight of one-day-old Muscovy ducks was around 46.39 g (Rashid et al., 2009) that was similar to the value of this study. Daily weight gain of Muscovy ducks ranged from 8.29 -26.83 for average until 13 weeks of age. The study also reported that DWG depended on the management methods of these ducks (Etuk et al., 2006).
The survey results were found in a range of the study of Kleczek et al. (2006), from France to Poland, Muscovy ducks imported had an average weight of 2,750-5,147 g. However, there were different weights between three breeds of Muscovy duck in this research when compared with Muscovy ducks in other countries. The results from this study were higher than a mean live weight of Muscovy duck in Nigeria, which was 2.73 kg (Yakubu, 2013). It was also higher than white-plumaged Muscovy ducks, which were heaviest with an average of 2.02 kg, mottled Muscovy ducks were 1.91 kg (Oguntunji and Ayorinde, 2014). It is due to growth performance of ducks depends on many factors such as breeds, conditions, feeding, nutrition, age, gender, and other factors. In table 3, the feed composition in three districts did not provide enough nutrients for these animals. In addition, the sensitivity of these features to environmental changes such as temperature and nutrition might be related to the body weight of birds from both agroecological zones in the current study. The information was also recorded in the study of Yakubu et al. (2011).

CONCLUSION
Muscovy duck farming in Tra Vinh province has emerged as small-scale farming with low performance. Local Muscovy ducks accounted for a large proportion of duck farming. French Muscovy ducks had the highest performance  with rich nutrient diets as compared to those of other breeds. However, the feed sources used for feeding Muscovy ducks in surveyed areas still depended too much on available feed resources without paying attention to the nutrient requirement. Based on the observed variances, there is a possibility for genetic improvement and nutrient advancement.