BURMAA: “I EARN MORE FROM SALES OF MILK TO GER KITCHEN”

In the past, Burmaa’s 11 cows used to produce 45 liters of milk per day, but Burmaa was not always able to sell this milk as there were too few buyers. Most of the time, she only needed a small amount of milk from her cows, primarily for household consumption, which resulted in many of her cows not being milked. Today, however, as a member of the “Dashvaanjil sun tsatsal” dairy cooperative, Burmaa produces 75liters of milk of 18 cows daily, and selling this milk is no longer a problem.

Burmaa lives in Alagtolgoi bagh, approximately 26km from Bulgan soum, in Khovd province. The local herders use the river Bulgan’s many islets, with their rich vegetation as sources of fodder for their animals. As a result, the area is also well known for its abundance of milk even in late autumn. Local herders are even able to milk their cows in winter, however, they did not have many opportunities to sell their milk. Due to its EU funding, the SECiM C2 project was able to provide $4,000 (USD) worth of dairy processing equipment and capacity building training to Burmaa and five other female herders, who were able to create their own small scale dairy processing unit known as a Ger Kitchen.

The Ger Kitchen collects milk from its members to produce 8-12 different types of dairy products including yogurt, raisins curd, sour cream, and butter. These products are in turn consumed by students and young children from three regional schools and five kindergartens under the School Lunch program. The Ger Kitchen also has orders from consumers in Bulgan soum, the provincial center.

With the profit from the increase in her milk sales in the first year of the project, Burmaa was able to buy 7 more dairy cows, which meant she now has 18 dairy cows to milk. Burmaa’s household production of milk has increased by 9,000 liters to reach 22,725 liters a year, as opposed to a total of 13,725 liters in 2016. Likewise, her annual household income has also increased by MNT 9.0 million.

DAIRY VALUE CHAIN IN REMOTE RURAL AREAS

Within a 250 km radius of Ulaanbaatar, the five largest dairy processors with established networks for milk collection are Suu, APU JSCs, TESO, Vitafit and Monfresh LLC. Outside of this radius, there is almost no milk collection infrastructure. Furthermore, the fact that milk production and supply drop drastically as winter approaches, provides little incentive for the dairy industry to invest in the development of a cold chain for dairy collection. Instead, the dairy industry relies on importing 6,000 tons of milk powder during winter to make 48 million liters of reconstituted milk. As such, SECiM C2 focused on piloting a model for smallholder dairy processors for the collection of milk beyond 250km radius of Ulaanbaatar. This required the formation of organized herder groups to supply small scale dairy processing plants, known as Ger Kitchens. These Ger Kitchens (GKs) were established with substantial project investment and started to produce value-added dairy products such as curds and butter at a uniform standard. SECiM’s efforts for the development of this model were not only concentrated on building the capacity of GKs to produce quality dairy products, but also capacity building at an institutional level for marketing organizations whose mission it is to collect dairy products. These dairy products were processed to be suitable for long term storage and transportation so that the GKs were able to supply larger dairy processors, which was an opportunity that larger processors could not miss. GKs were also able to have their products enter the local markets under a single brand name. This business model which links small scale processors with large scale processors through intermediary collection centers and/or sales points was successfully piloted in Khovd, Khuvsgul and Dornod aimags.