It’s not enough to just keep a dairy herd because donating milk is not profitable. This opinion was expressed by the chairman of the GorinDar agricultural service cooperative Yuri Potapchuk during a seminar for dairy processors, government officials and banks.
The event was organized by the Rivne Center for Local Government Development of the U-LEAD with Europe Program. “The one who contains the dairy herd will have a negative business if he doesn’t do his own processing,” said Yuri Potapchuk.
According to him, simply donating milk is unprofitable, because since 2016 the acceptance price for it has not increased, while the cost of animal feed, veterinary services, provision of grazing has increased significantly.
“Therefore, we made an unambiguous conclusion for ourselves: we need to start processing. Our farm is located in Kostopolsky district, and production - in Goshchansky, where we were allocated a room for a small cheese factory.
They took a loan, bought equipment. We directly studied the experience of working with similar small "workshops" of cheese in Poland, Austria, Germany, and in the regions of Western Ukraine.
But we decided not to repeat their recipe, but to create our own “highlight” and began to specialize in the production of soft cheeses, which we now sell in small batches, including in Kiev, ”he said.
The farmer noted that if you produce milk and process it yourself, you get 15% of the added value. And with a well-established processing process, you can achieve an indicator of 20-25%.
According to Natalya Novodarskaya, chairman of the Dyuksin Dorf farm, who is also engaged in the production of cheeses, only a high-quality herd can produce excellent raw materials, and therefore they are engaged in breeding dairy cows: they started to keep 5, and now there are 31 of them.
Ruslan Sedoi, director of the Rivne Center for Local Government Development, emphasized that the time has come to unite small cheese producers in the association.
