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Abstract
* Livestock production and marketing has the potential of improving the smallholder farmer’s livelihood, but small herd size limits smallholder livestock commercialization. Thus understanding the herd dynamics is a pragmatic initial step in addressing this problem and providing solutions to building and maintaining the herd size. Births are the primary source of building the herd size while deaths as reflected by high mortality rates are the major outflow channel. It is encouraging that cattle mortality rates have reduced and the population growth rates increased between 2012 and 2015 though more still needs to be done.