The Sunday News
Dumisani Nsingo, Senior Farming Reporter
MILK deliveries at the rural community owned Umzingwane Dairy Association (UDA)’s processing plant, Umzingwane Milk Centre in Matabeleland South Province have doubled up to more than 1 000 litres a month due to improved pastures.
UDA chairperson Mrs Sheila Lupuwana said the rains received in February and last month improved pastures in the area, a situation which resulted in availability of adequate graze for the association affiliates’ dairy cows.
UDA was formed by a group of rural farmers mostly women from Umzingwane District in 2002, and operates a milk processing plant, Umzingwane Milk Centre, situated at Mawabeni Business Centre.
Milk deliveries from the organisation’s 15 active members, which had fallen to as low as 558 litres in November due to a myriad of challenges, chief among them being the drought have rebounded to over 1 000 litres with 1 184,05 litres being recorded in January while 1 797,5 was received in February.
At its peak the association, which used to have 45 members, used to produce about 5 000 litres a month producing pasteurised milk, yoghurt, ice cream and dairy juices.
“We are now overwhelmed by milk deliveries at the centre to the extent that our pasteurised milk stock pile in our cold rooms is moving very slow on the local market.
“At one stage we had over 3 000 sachets of 500 millilitres holed up in the refrigerators. The situation is being made worse by the closure of surrounding boarding schools for holidays, the schools are our major customers,” Mrs Lupuwana said.
The association is struggling to effectively market its pasteurised milk outside Umzingwane District largely due to lack of transport.
“We have over the years failed to effectively market our products outside the district due to lack of vehicles to ferry them to potential markets. However, lately Fintrac came to our rescue and took our pasteurised milk to Filabusi, Gwanda and Bulawayo. It also encouraged the farmers to deliver more milk to the centre.”
Fintrac is a United States consulting company, which implemented a five-year programme last year aimed at assisting UDA to improve the sustainability and viability of its milk project.
The organisation is implementing projects across three continents to improve incomes and food security for some of the world’s most vulnerable populations.
“Out of the 15 farmers that are still active only 30 percent were delivering milk at the centre with the others failing to deliver due to poor yields as a result of drought with most of them failing to purchase supplementary stockfeed due to lack of money,” Mrs Lupuwana said.
In an effort to improve pastures availability, the association is looking forward to starting fodder banks.
“We have had a number of organisations coming to teach us on how to do fodder banks but sadly for us this concept doesn’t yield much due to lack of readily available water at our homesteads.
“We are therefore appealing to organisations or individuals to donate irrigation equipment as well as to drill boreholes for us to start our own fodder banks. We are also appealing to financial institutes to extend flexible loans for us to start this project,” Mrs Lupuwana said.
