Workshop participants and Cianjur Utara dairy cooperative management staff.
Global Food Studies (Associate Professor Wendy Umberger, Dr Risti Permani and PhD student Camilo Esparza Garcia) collaborating with Bogor Agricultural University under the leadership of Dr Arief Daryanto and Dr Sahara recently organised the second workshop “Capacity Building for Research: Promoting Inclusive Development of Agricultural Value Chains” between 27 and 30 October 2014. This event was a follow up to the first workshop held between 1 and 3 September 2014 that had an aim of enhancing participants’ research capacity to assess the success and effectiveness of dairy and horticultural value chain upgrading in Indonesia. Dr Brad Granzin from Australasian Dairy Consultants and Ms Zita Ritchie (Department of Environment and Primary Industries) also presented at the workshop. A total of 22 Australians and Indonesians were involved the second workshop and fieldwork.
In this second workshop, participants had opportunities to better understand challenges and opportunities for dairy industry in West Java by practising value chain research skills in the field through in-depth semi structured interviews with stakeholders in the chain, focus group discussions and structured interviews using quantitative survey instruments. The workshop also presented an introduction to extension and practice change.
Day 1 - Group discussions at IPB
Fieldwork activities between 28 and 30 October 2014 were focussed on three institutions in dairy industry in West Java. They are two dairy cooperatives – KUD Cianjur Utara (previously known as KUD Mandiri Cipanas) and KUD Giri Tani – and a dairy processing and agro tourism company, Cimory that is supplied by the two focus cooperatives. The idea was to allow participants do ‘paddock to plate’ investigations by understanding challenges and opportunities at the producer level, cooperative level as well as processors and retailers.
Notes from Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) with dairy farmers
Focus group discussions and individual interviews with farmers highlighted farmers’ main challenges for increasing their milk quality and milk production. Common issues included feed and land scarcity, limited access to technical assistance, high feed costs and difficulties to control diseases in particular mastitis and manage reproduction.The field trip provided insights into the emergence of smallholder-initiated dairy business that has occured in Cisarua area in the last 5-10 years including Eyoci farm and Harry’s farm. These medium scale dairy farms have been successful upgrading their business by processing their milk to yoghurt, pasteurised milk, etc. Incentives to do milk processing are evident; Pasteurised milk can be sold between Rp 11,000 to Rp 15,000 per litre (approximately AUD 1,5 per litre), much higher compared to the price of fresh milk between Rp 4,000 to Rp 5,000 (or approximately 50 cents a litre). Although there is no one (business) model fits all, these farms can be valuable knowledge resources to local dairy farmers.
Participants will present their report at the final workshop, which is expected to be held in February 2015.
Visit this link to read more about our series of workshops on dairy sector in Indonesia.
