Falling milk prices force farmers to sell their cattle
Print Edition
FARMERS in Qinghai Province, a major dairy products producing area in China’s west, are being forced to sell their cattle after the prices of raw milk fell significantly this year.
The Beijing Times reported yesterday that dairy companies were also cutting down on their intake of raw milk from farmers over hygiene fears.
Dairy producers said they preferred buying milk from companies, forcing farmers in Datong and Huangzhong counties to sell their cows as they could not afford to sustain them any longer.
Datong is the main source of raw milk in Qinghai. About 45,500 cows are reared by the county farmers and selling raw milk is the main source of income for them, the newspaper reported.
Farmers said milk was being sold for 3.6 yuan (58 US cents) per kilogram last year, but had dropped to 1.6 yuan per kg this year, which was even cheaper than mineral water, the report said.
Local farmer Han Yuliang said his two cows produced 22.5 kilograms of milk every day that would earn him between 30 to 40 yuan per day.
But the cost of feeding them was more than 70 yuan.
Another farmer Ye Zhanhai of Xiazhiquan Village sold his three cows. “In the past, the 10,000-plus yuan earned in a year from raising cows and selling raw milk was the only income of my family. But now I don’t even have money to buy feed for the cows,” Ye said.
Han Qiang, the general manager of the Tianlu Dairy Co Ltd, the biggest dairy procurement and production company in Qinghai, said the company was not keen on buying milk from farmers because of their poor hygiene conditions.
Han said farmers didn’t pay much attention to hygiene, pouring raw milk randomly into dirty buckets, which were also used to feed cattle.
A new dairy product standard was introduced in 2010, which raised the maximum permissible bacteria allowed in dairy products to two million cells per milliliter from 500,000. It was 20 times higher than that in Europe and the United States.
But some experts have said the interests of farmers should have been taken into account as they cannot meet the high standard in the present conditions.
Some farmers in Shandong Province are cooperating with cooperatives and big farms to raise their rearing standard. They use pasture on land and supply grass to farms, experts said.
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