MAKONDE – ZIMBABWE spends over US$400million a month on milk imports, but a Makonde
commercial farmer is determined to cut the country’s milk import bill supplying Nestle and other
customers in and around Chinhoyi as well as assisting small-scale dairy farmers in the surrounding
area.
Crawford John Maguire, who has 40 dairy cows at his farm in Portlet and is supplying 10 000litres of
milk every other day to Nestle with the aid of supplies from other small scale farmers in the
surrounding area, said dairy farmers in the country were unable to satisfy local demand for milk and
are therefore unable to export.
“There is not enough milk in Zimbabwe to supply ourselves. We are still short of 60 percent of our
requirements, that’s why there is this incentive between the processors to support the growers,”
explained Maguire.
The farmer is making every effort to support the milk out-growers surrounding his farm and as far as
Chitomborwizi, to get their milk cooled in his cooling shed and sold to their biggest buyer, Nestle.
They have tried adding value to the milk by producing sour milk but stopped after the realisation that
people preferred fresh milk rather than sour milk.
“I later realised that it was better for me to sell just fresh milk and people do whatever they want with
the milk, if they want to make sour milk, they can make sour milk, it’s their choice, so right now there
is an option to do cheese. But I’m a farmer, I’m not a cheese maker. It is possible to employ someone
to do that, but at the moment I’m just going to stick with milk,” he said.
His 40 dairy cows are milked by hand at four milking bays and their milk is put into 20litre buckets
and women take turns to carry the buckets to the cooling shed where the milk is weighed, taken
samples of, and then put into the refrigerated tanks where it is cooled to 0 or 4 degrees Celsius.
“We have 40 dairy cows producing milk at the moment although we have also done 80 cows with 4
people, and we also have milked over hundred cows.
“Each cow is milked and we have a bucket with calibration, and each cow is milked twice a day,
morning and afternoon,” he said.
It was important to evenly space the milking times for the cows. Internationally, some dairy farmers
were probably milking four times as much milk as he is getting with the same number of cows as they
milk their cows three times a day that is, eight hours spacing.
“So, we are not producing as much milk as possibly but it is economical, because the higher
production we are going to get the more we are stressing the cows and the more diseases they are
going to get.”
If it was a factory, the cows would usually live in a shed and would be going from shed to shed after
milking and they would be producing about 100 litres a day, but this was not really natural.
Maguire said that they were giving the cows an environment that was more conducive as it was a
natural environment. The cows are free to graze on the grass, walk on the sand unlike at the factories
where it was slab concrete all over.
“The cows end up their feet hurting and one would end up incurring another cost to call the veterinary
doctor to treat the cows. The cows end up getting stressed and they end up catching diseases,” he said.
When the cows are being milked, they are at the same time being fed with dairy meal and it’s
specifically formulated so that it has the right amounts of nutrients that the cows need after milking.
“The cows need to replace what is being taken out from them, so the dairy meal is high in calcium and
in order to make more milk they need to have more proteins and enough energy,” he said.
One typical feature of the dairy cows is that they don’t get fat.
The farm is using the typical Mashona breed, which is basically a beef cow, for dairy farming.
The Mashona and the Jersey cattle are cross bred in order to produce the desired Jersey breed that
produces milk with more cream, which is needed by Nestle.
The small scale farmers from the surrounding areas are coded and they are recorded every time they
deliver milk and samples are taken to undergo the alcohol test.
Ben Banda, the farm manager, said upon being mixed with alcohol sour milk curdles unlike fresh
milk.
The samples from the different farmers are sent to Harare where they are again tested to see if they do
not contain any chemicals, for example, antibiotics which may be harmful to people when consumed.
“Five litres of milk contaminated with antibiotics is enough to contaminate 10 000 litres that’s why
we have codes on the farmers recorded in order to easily track who supplied contaminated milk and
they have to compensate the whole 10 000litres lost because hauchashande unotoraswa. There are
cases like that and another farmer is still paying compensation for milk lost,” said Banda.
Besides supplying Nestle, the farm also has three wheeled bikes that move around Chinhoyi selling
fresh milk.
In December the farm lost about 25 dairy cattle to January disease, a tick borne disease.
“The medication is almost ineffective because these dairy cows almost cannot survive the disease
itself,” he said.
Many farmers in the area lost many cattle to the January disease.
