After a two and a half hour long trip, up the side of a mountain, along a bumpy track I reached the District Livestock Services Office in Besisahar. After meeting the team we went to visit a local dairy. I was staggered to find out that any milk produced here will be transported using the local bus along the potholed road we’d just travelled on!
Having visited more than a dozen dairies since arriving in Nepal, my questioning process is pretty slick. It needs to be since we hurry along as the evening draws in. There are 17 cows in the herd, with 13 ‘in milk’, and daily production is just 70 litres. There is no lack of enthusiasm on this farm, which has been set up for just over a year, but as we talk I discover that many of the cows, despite their stage in lactation and low yield are not yet in calf. This is a very worrying sign for the future.
We then moved on to visit another cow farm - when we finally arrived after a long winding descent to an even more remote location, it was dark and I could only use my head torch to check the cattle. Even with this poor light I could see that the cows are of a Jersey type but they were quite thin and unfortunately both the feed troughs and water buckets were empty. The farmer, like most British farmers at the moment, has been debating the price of milk with buyers and is also in the desperate position of only producing 18 litres a day from his four milking cows. But as we loaded ourselves back into the truck I thought through his case and the one positive that at least some of his cows were back in calf.
Here in Nepal the dry season has begun and we will not see significant rain until June. Apart from tree fodder leaves the only other bulk feed offered to cows will be rice straw. Having spent a lifetime worrying about providing enough feed for cows, in a country where forage production is abundant, my thoughts focussed on the plight of all these farmers and how I could make a difference.
Narayan, the second Veterinary officer, from the District Livestock Office organised the trip – he is very enthusiastic and we’re looking forward to working together as a team with a single purpose of improving the long term situation for farmers. The trip was very promising and we’ve followed it up with a meeting to establish some preliminary aims and he has taken me on a short visit to a local egg producer who had a health issue with his flock. Narayan and I outside the District Livestock Office in Besisahar.
Whilst talking the situation through with the poultry farmer I was drawn to look at the large pile of cauliflower waste in his yard. Vegetables are his other enterprise. Narayan and I spent the return journey to the office, discussing the prospect of feeding cauliflower waste, which is plentiful, to dairy cows during the dry season. This green leafy material would moisten the straw well and act as a source of degradable protein. All around there are green shoots of vegetable plantings.
There are also piles of waste cauliflower green shoots, that may eventually help farmers with their feed problems. There are also the further green shoots in my working relationship with Narayan. The first hopeful signs that someone else really does want to grasp the ‘ownership’ of finding solutions to the many problems which face milk producers here in Lamjung. Let’s hope I can nurture these first shoots of hope, into a strong young tree that will continue grow when I am gone.
I know sometimes because of the distance the plight of farming communities and your support for them can seem remote, however I can assure you that you’re making a huge difference for farmers and their families in Nepal. By working together to improve the future instead of sending aid we can change the people of Nepal’s prospects for generations to come.
Best wishes for now,
Simon
