North China's dairy sector expanding

 

 

China's dairy industry is growing bigger in North China's Hebei Province, with 109 new dairy farms built this year.

 

Cows in Hebei's Xingtang County were sent to the new dairy farms. The County government has encouraged dairy farmers to set up the large farms of at least 1,000 cows by providing subsidies worth RMB600,000 (US$87,860) for each farm. As part of the agreement, farms that get the subsidies must look after the smaller farmers' cows.

 

One of the farms, Kangyuan Dairy Farm, supplies milk to Sanyuan, the dairy company that took over the bankrupted Sanlu Group, which was at the centre of the melamine-tainted milk scandal last year.

 

Lu Shuping, deputy director of the Animal Husbandry Bureau in Xingtang County, one of China's major dairy  producing counties, said they have closed 323 milk stations that collected substandard raw milk from individual farmers.

 

Cow farmers hope that the new breeding system will give them the competitive edge by fundamentally improving the quality of raw milk, said Liu Yingwu, secretary general of the Dairy Association in Shijiazhuang, capital of Hebei Province.

 

Individual farmers are still responsible for their own herds in the new dairy farms, but the farms have standard management of feedstuff, milking and inoculation.

 

Small farmers benefit from keeping their cows at the big farms, where the cows are healthy and therefore the milk is better quality. However, the transformation of Xingtang's dairy industry is forcing many farmers leave the business.

 

If the new dairy farms are not close to the smaller farmers' homes then they may feel it is too time-consuming to commute everyday, said Lu Shuping.

 

The melamine crisis brought changes in many ways but it also made survival of small dairy farms difficult as nobody was willing to purchase raw milk, according to farmers.

 

Lu said the number of milking cows in the county has dropped by 25,000 from 97,000 in October 2008, as farmers either killed or sold cows, mainly old ones that produced less milk.

 

Hebei Province now has 1.6 million milk cows, 70,000-less than the same period last year. But the number of livestock has increased since April.

 

The Chinese dairy industry is recovering after the melamine scandal, said Wang Yansheng, a Hebei Provincial Dairy Association official, adding that the scandal has helped improve the quality of milk.

 

China's dairy output amounted to 14.23 million tonnes in the first three quarters of this year, up 3.42% year-on-year.