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.
Hello and welcome to my first update from Nepal! Firstly, thank you so much for choosing to receive my volunteer updates, by sharing updates on the work and progress I make I hope you’ll be able to see the amazing impact your kind gifts are having on people living in poverty. I will be using the skills I’ve learnt through many years farming at my home in Somerset, to work with local farmers here in Nepal to improve life for them and their communities. I know firsthand how there is no substitute for hard work and good people on a farm to really make it work and this is why I think volunteering is so important to really making international development work.
A country of extremes
