Cream and the crop: The dairy question
Mbongeni Mguni | Monday October 16, 2023 06:00
Dairy sector veteran, Dr Wame Boitumelo, who is also a well-published scholar on the industry, remembers a simpler and better time for the country.
“Five or six decades ago, in fact before Independence, we were a net exporter of milk products in the form of cream,” he said.
“We used to sell a lot of cream to Mafikeng and from Tsabong, they were also exporting.”
Boitumelo’s comments at the recent Conference on Agriculture and Food Security seemed to shake the room full of participants. Any form of dairy self-sufficiency at any point in the country’s history is a far cry from the perennial under-production the country and its citizens have resigned themselves to, over the years.
Agricultural statistics are generally sketchy or dated, but the last available figures for dairy production indicate that the country requires or consumes about 65 million litres of milk each year, a figure that excludes milk products.
Local production accounts for, at the most, less than 12% of this amount. Most of the imports are sourced from South Africa, the regional powerhouse whose agriculture sector both anchors and under-develops the country’s food production and security.
Botswana has an estimated two million cattle of which under 10,000 are specifically the dairy breed, meaning a significant portion of the domestic milk production comes from animals reared as beef breeds.
Making up the production gap is an opportunity conservatively estimated at $53 million and would represent a concrete indicator that the country’s long held ambitions of food self-sufficiency are not only possible, but coming together.
Instead, the sombre picture has obtained for so long that many at the recent conference thought they had misheard Boitumelo’s remarks. The animal science specialist explained that the transformation of the economy at Independence had eaten away at the successes that had been achieved in the dairy sector.
“After the establishment of the Botswana Meat Commission and after the improvements in education for school going age groups, we lost a lot of people who were working at the cattle post.
“Those people were engaged in milking, herding and other activities.
“The Commission’s establishment meant that people had an alternative source of income instead of milking cattle for cream and sending that to South Africa,” he said.
The golden age of mining that exploded in the 1970s could not have made the situation better for dairy farming, with minerals such as diamonds eventually leading to economic deepening and urbanisation that has characterised the growth of modern Botswana.
Activities such as milk and cream production have largely retreated to household or family level and beyond that, have been limited to some entrepreneurs distributing homemade madila.
Large-scale dairy farms, the kind that can support country-level consumption, are very few and largely concentrated in the country’s South East. This is in order to be closer to South African inputs and expertise, particularly feed, the single most important factor for success in dairy production.
The list of reasons why local production remains a drop of the national milk demand, is long, well-published and associated with inducing head-aches amongst policyholders and consumers alike.
Letsomo Mariri, the Ministry of Agriculture’s chief scientific officer, neatly summarised the challenges in a presentation made two years ago:
*Shortage of dairy cattle
*Recurrent droughts
*Outbreak of diseases, e.g., Foot and Mouth
*Inadequate and expensive dairy feed
*Unskilled manpower
*Limited land for dairy farming
*Undeveloped value chain
*Lack of appropriate infrastructure
Despite the odds, John Ackerman is one of those who have dared to venture into commercial dairy farming.
“The biggest constraint in dairy is sufficient feeds of good quality because if this is not to the right standard, the production will be bad,” he told the Food and Agriculture Security conference.
“A cow that produces 25 litres a day will consume about 25 to 30 kilogrammes of feed. That quality can differ a lot between seasons and require that you add extra nutrients.
“A dairy cow can drink up to 150 litres of water a day and a beef one, up to 100 litres on a hot day.
“You have to think about all these things, especially when you are facing a herd of 300 cattle.”
Ackerman has a colourful analogy for the sensitivity of dairy cattle to any changes in the quality of their feed.
“You can cheat on your wife and she may not find out, but with dairy, if you cheat on the feed, it immediately finds out.
“Dairy cows are simple things but you have to have the same thing every day for them, in order to have a consistent supply of milk.”
The challenges have left the country overly reliant on South Africa, a country that has experienced Foot and Mouth Disease and other disruptions, including civil unrest, over the years. Still, South African supply dominates the shelves of local supermarkets at proportions that don’t reflect the small 12% domestic milk production.
“At least 95% of the milk is imported and I don’t think any other African country is like this,” said Choppies co-founder and CEO, Ramachandran Ottapathu.
“Even a pure desert may not be like that.
“There’s no excuse for us. Before Independence we were a net exporter which raises more difficult questions to answer and it’s our own creation.
“It’s a huge risk for us that one incident of Foot and Mouth Disease on a farm in South Africa’s North-West will stop supply into the country and over days, the milk stock finishes.
“That’s a big risk.”
Known more popularly as Ram, Choppies’ CEO is outspoken on issues of local food self-sufficiency, particularly the interventions required to establish a functioning, stable “farm to fork” value chain in the country.
He told the recent Agriculture and Food Security conference that the litany of challenges inhibiting the growth of the dairy sector were not insurmountable.
“India has one billion people and they don’t import even one litre of milk, even though they have a small landmass and half of it not even cultivated,” he said.
“They have communal farming where four to five families come together and pull together across villages, collecting and bringing production up.”
According to Ram, such endeavours and the success of local dairy in general, will require concessional funding. While he conceded that this type of funding is not easy to come by as Botswana is classified as a middle-income country by development finance institutions, again there are ways around the challenge.
One, is for retailers such as Choppies to support farmers through supplier development programmes.
“Around 2006, we started giving small advances to farmers and we took pride in that because we played a catalytic role.
“One of the farmers produced a small type of potato and when he came to us, we gave him a P5,000 advance.
“We ended up giving him P28 million and today he is a very major farmer.
“That’s how it all starts; there’s always a humble beginning for everything.”
Prominent farmer, Lembie Tlhalerwa, says the challenge of feed also has a local solution. Talana Farms is more than ready to plug the shortage of high quality feedstock, she told the conference.
“We’ve been producing lucerne since 2019 but we are not able to grow our production because there’s little uptake and yet we are always hearing that the main challenge for dairy is access to feed,” she said.
“How are local feed producers going to grow if the local dairy production industry so heavily depends on importing feed from anywhere else except locally?
“We do approach dairy farmers to get contracts, but the first thing they say is ‘who grades your lucerne?’
“The relevant government department says they are not aware of any standards for grading lucerne and we have also imported lucerne and compared it bale for bale with what we produce.
“We could not tell the difference.”
Tlhalerwa added: “I can say a lot of time, we produce up to ten times better than what’s sitting on the shelves in terms of lucerne.”
The challenges between dairy farmers and Talana Farms appear to revolve more around the distance between the South East where most farms are, and the Tuli Block where Tlhalerwa is operating from.
However for those eager to see growth in the industry, the potential of abundant home-grown feedstock overshadows whatever niggling logistics still need to be sorted out between the different sections of the local dairy chain.
With retailers also committing themselves to supplier development and government transforming its agricultural interventions to focus more on commercial endeavours, there is hope yet for the local dairy sector.
Government intervention will particularly be required in the area of breeding stock, another principle challenge holding the dairy sector back. South African breeding stock is frequently trapped behind an FMD freeze, while attempts to source from Australia and the European Union, have been inhibited by costs.
Farmers are counting on the state’s new-found zeal for embryotic imports to spur the dairy sector, an idea particularly popular amongst smallholder farmers who hope to act as a form of feeder structure for the larger operations.
Industry stakeholders are calling for an all-hands on deck approach.
“Milk production has regressed over the years,” said Ram.
“The opportunities are however huge and we have to work together on this, from government to the private sector.”