THE Department of Agriculture (DA) wants to ramp up local milk production to meet at least 10 percent of annual domestic requirement by 2022 and reduce the country’s reliance on imports.
Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel F. Piñol said the DA is now crafting a five-year livestock and dairy road map that will increase the country’s cattle population to 5 million heads, from the current 2.5 million heads, by the time President Duterte steps down from office.
“The long-neglected dairy and livestock sectors will receive a boost when the DA starts a five-year master plan to empower backyard hog raisers, increase the national cattle population and raise milk production from 1 percent to 10 percent of the national requirement starting 2018,” Piñol said in a Facebook post over the weekend.
“The 5-Year Road Map for Livestock and Dairy, which is now being crafted by the DA, will bring together all of the agencies under the department and focus their resources on the declared targets,” he added.
Under the road map, identified participating villages or towns will be designated as community multiplier farms, which will be owned and managed by a group of farmers, according to Piñol.
He said every community multiplier farm will have a minimum of 100 heifers and will serve as a breeding farm, a dairy-production area and a learning center.
“I have asked technical people to design a shed that will utilize solar technology to provide power and water,” Piñol said.
“Under the scheme, whatever earnings are made will be shared among the members of the community multiplier farms and the income could be generated from the sale of the calves and the milk production,” he added.
To jump-start the program, the DA chief said the government will establish community multiplier farms in at least 1,000 communities by 2019, particularly in areas where forage and feed materials, such as sugarcane and corn, are abundant.
“That would mean 100,000 heifers, which, at an average birthing rate of 70 percent, would produce about 70,000 calves, which would also be ready for breeding by 2021,” Piñol said.
“The 70,000 heifers, which would produce calves, are estimated to produce an average of 5 liters of milk each every day for a national production of 350,000 liters,” he added.
Piñol said the DA would set up an additional 1,000 community multiplier farms by 2020 and another 1,000 by 2021.
“To ensure market for the milk production, the DA will collaborate with the departments of Health, Social Welfare and Development and Education to start a milk-feeding program,” he said.
Piñol said the Brazilian government has pledged to support Manila’s goal of hiking cattle and dairy production. He said he met with his Brazilian counterparts in a bilateral meeting in Rome, Italy, on the sidelines of the 40th session of the United Nations’s Food and Agriculture Organization Conference last week.
“Brazilian State Minister for Agriculture Blairo Borges, in a bilateral meeting with the Philippine delegation, said his country is willing to share outstanding breeds of cattle, especially the proven Girolando, which is a cross-breed of the Brazilian Gyr and Holstein and is ideal both for milk and meat production in tropical climates,” Piñol said. “Minister Borges also pledged technical support for the Philippine livestock program, including the development of forage.”
This makes Brazil the fourth nation to manifest support for the country’s livestock and dairy program following New Zealand, Israel and Argentina, according to Piñol. He said the first batch of Brazilian Girolandos will arrive in 2019 and will be kept in the community multiplier farms established by the DA.
“The first batch of cattle from Brazil will be the ready-to-breed females or heifers and will be impregnated using fertilized embryos, which could come from Argentina and Brazil,” Piñol said.
Data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) showed that the country’s cattle population, as of January 1, was pegged at 2.553 million heads, slightly lower than the 2.547 million heads recorded a year ago.
Last year the country’s local milk production grew 3.78 percent to 21,160 metric tons (MT), from 20,390 MT recorded in 2015, according to the latest report of the National Dairy Administration (NDA).
The NDA, an attached agency of the DA, attributed the expansion to the increase in the number of the milk-producing herd.
Despite this, however, the share of local milk output to the country’s total supply shrank while that of imports went up. The Philippines bought a total of 65,600 MT of ready-to-drink liquid milk from abroad last year, 53.77 percent higher than the 42,660 MT imported in 2015.
On an annual basis, government data showed that Philippine dairy imports expanded by 54 percent to 2.77 million MT in 2016.
Dairy products are currently the Philippines’s third-largest agricultural import after wheat and soybean meal.