The Hindu Business Line : NGO's 2-pronged strategy to help raise milk yield

THOUGH the country has the largest cattle population in the world, but the milk yield in the country is 523 kg an animal a year, compared with the world average of 2,029 kg and 9,291 kg in Israel. Clearly, something needs to be done about improving yields here.

The National Agro Foundation - an NGO, founded by the late C. Subramaniam, who served as Union Agriculture and Finance Minister, and once headed by the President, Dr Abdul Kalam, has taken it upon itself the task to raise farm incomes by improving milk yield.

To do this, the NAF has chalked a two-pronged strategy. First, get each family in the 45-odd villages it has adopted to buy a cow of high milk-yielding breed. For this, the NAF has recently signed a pact with Bharat Overseas Bank. Under the agreement, the NAF would choose the credit-worthy borrowers for the bank, arrange for supply of high-breed cows, help maintain the animals and facilitate offtake of milk. But the loans will be given by the bank directly to the borrowers.

The bank's Chairman, Mr G. Krishna Murthy, told Business Line that the bank expected to disburse Rs 10 crore over the next three years. These loans carry an interest of nine per cent.

The second part of the strategy is to artificially inseminate the existing nondescript cows, so that the offsprings are high-yielding.

The process has been going on since 2001 and around 3,600 cows have been inseminated. This has resulted in about 900 calves, about half of which are females. Just now the second-generation animals have started yielding milk — about eight litres a day, compared with a litre of the parent.

According to Mr M.K. Raju, Chairman, NAF, the Foundation aims to make each family be able to earn an annual income of at least Rs 50,000, about 40 per cent of which would come from milk. "Each family can own a cow regardless of what else it does," he points out.

The Foundation has identified several other ways a rural family can earn. First of all, most of the families own tiny bits of land, say half an acre, but get incomes as meagre as Rs 300 a month out of it. Raising productivity of the land is one simple way of raising incomes. NAF has set up a soil testing facility in Chennai and has a body of agriculture experts to advise people of what to sow and when. Some farmers that Business Line spoke to said their groundnut yields had gone up 30 per cent after the NAF came in.

The Foundation has set up a `Farmers Training Centre', which also houses a tractor service facility. A tractor is also available for hire. The training centre is also used to conduct workshops for bank officers in rural development, so that they are able to appraise rural credit proposals better.

NAF is in the process of putting up some cooking gas plants in some villages, which can generate cooking gas from cow dung. The dung that remains after the gas goes out is a much better organic manure than the dung before the process, Mr Raju said.

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