To study the knowledge of dairy animal owners in improved dairy husbandry practices a field survey in Bihar state was conducted during April-June’2016. Data were collected through personal interview from randomly selected 1550 dairy animal owners from randomly selected villages from Chhapra, Vaishali district of Bihar with the help of pre-tested structured schedule. Survey indicates that the 71.67 percentage of the livestock farmers belonged to middle age category range from 35-50 years, followed by 15.00 percent in young age category and 13.33% belonged to old age category. Female participants were 40.36 percentage while 45.57 percentage were male participants. The average size of family in the study was 8.74 persons with 4.75 male members and 4.0 female members. 65.4% of the respondents’ family was formally educated followed 34.6% of the respondents’ family were not formally educated. In the present study it was observed that 30.7% of the respondents had acquired education up to 10th and 19.8% of respondents had acquired education upto 12th class. 13.3% of respondents had acquired education upto graduate and post graduate level while 13% of respondents had acquired education upto 5th class. Survey data revealed that the highest respondents were from OBC 59.4% class followed by 29.8% General Caste. Percentage of schedule caste was 8.1% and percentage of schedule tribe was 2.7 %. Average size of land owned was 2.24 percentage. 71.0 percentage belong to Marginal (0.1-1 ha) land while 13.7 percentage belong to small (1.1-2 ha), 3.5 percentage belong to owners having above 2 ha land. Average number of animals owned were 1.99 while average number of cow owned were 1.75. Average number of buffaloes owned was 0.24. For distribution of cows and buffaloes by type of breed show highest proportion was of crossbreed cow 75.92 percentage followed by 20.46 percentage of Indigenous cow and 3.62 percentage of Non-descript cow. In case of buffaloes it shows 55.76 percentage of upgraded buffalo and 44.24 percentage of non-descript buffaloes. In milk market study about 38.7% of farmers sell their milk to private dairy, followed by cooperative dairy (33.0%) and open market (28.2%). Likewise the average quantity of milk sold per farmer per day to private dairy was 2.72 litres, 2.32 litres to cooperative dairy and 1.98 litres to open market. Around 62.9% of the farmers sell their milk within the village while the remaining 37.1% farmers sell milk outside the village.

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