Anyone who makes, stores or sells cattle feed, poultry feed or mineral mixture in Gujarat will soon need a state licence. The Gujarat Legislative Assembly on 10 September unanimously passed the Gujarat Livestock Feed, Poultry Feed and Mineral Mixture (Regulation of Production, Storage, Distribution, Sale and Quality Control) Bill, 2026, moved by Animal Husbandry Minister Jitubhai Vaghani, ThePrint reported. The law ties feed quality to national standards and attaches prison terms to adulteration.
What the law requires
Manufacturers will have to meet standards set by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). The law provides for periodic testing of feed samples and regulates packaging and labels to stop misleading claims. The minister told the House that licences will be issued through an online, faceless system, Asianet Newsable reported.
The penalties scale with the harm, according to reports in The News Mill and Asianet Newsable:
- Substandard feed: fine up to Rs 5 lakh and a one-year licence suspension.
- Misleading branding: fine up to Rs 5 lakh and a three-year suspension.
- Adulterated feed, no animal death: licence cancelled, up to one year in jail and a Rs 5 lakh fine.
- Adulterated feed that kills an animal: licence cancelled, seven to 10 years in jail and a fine up to Rs 10 lakh.
Farmers who mix feed at home for their own animals fall outside the law, as does feed made for research.
Why Gujarat wanted a state law
Gujarat has more than 106 lakh buffaloes and 96 lakh cows, according to figures cited in the Assembly, besides sheep, goats and poultry. Many of those animals belong to small households that pour milk at a village dairy cooperative twice a day. For them, bought feed and mineral supplements are a recurring cash cost, and a sack of poor feed shows up as lower milk yield, fertility trouble or a sick animal long before anyone thinks to test it.
Vaghani framed the bill as protection for honest manufacturers and farmers against firms that cut corners, and linked it to the One Health idea that animal, human and environmental health are connected. The district milk unions under the Amul umbrella already make and sell cattle feed to their members. The new rules matter most for private brands, repackers and village traders who sell loose mineral mixture and feed with little checking today.
What it means for dairy farmers
A licence regime gives a farmer someone to hold responsible. When a buyer can trace a sack to a licensed maker and seller, a complaint has a name and a licence number attached. Farmers who want to use the law should keep the bill, the bag and any batch number on the label, because without them proving where bad feed came from gets hard.
The heaviest penalty depends on proof that feed caused an animal’s death. That needs a veterinary post-mortem and a lab report linking the two, done quickly. A cow that dies in a village far from a veterinary hospital may never get that examination, so the deterrent effect of the jail term will depend on how far the state’s testing network reaches.
Small shopkeepers who sell a few bags of mineral mixture alongside groceries face a new compliance step. The home-feed exemption covers a farmer feeding their own herd. It does not appear to cover a farmer who mixes extra feed and sells it to neighbours, and the rules will need to say where that line falls.
What to watch
The bill sets the frame; the operative detail will come in rules the Animal Husbandry department has yet to publish. Those rules should name the licensing authority, the notified testing laboratories, the sampling frequency and the deadline for existing sellers to get licensed. Dairy unions and farmers’ groups will also want to know whether the state plans to publish sample test results, which would let buyers compare brands.
Sources: ThePrint, Asianet Newsable, The News Mill
This report was written with AI assistance from the publicly reported sources linked here; each fact was cross-checked against at least two of them.