Bureau of Agriculture of Dongxihu district disclosed recently that a modernized environmental breeding subzone will be started within the year with investment of RMB two hundred million Yuan, occupying 5000 mou and 6000 milk cows.
It is described that the milk industry breeding subzone will be composed by such functional areas as production area, feed processing area and management area. Its production and processing procedure shall be controlled by computer with the first rate domestic technical level.
Currently there are 17000 milk cows on hand in Dongxihu district, with 11 standardized breeding subzones in the whole district and 80% of the mild cows have settled here.
In the 1950s, Dongxihu district began to cultivate milk cow. There were 5000 ones on hand in the whole district at peak times. Because of lacking of support from leading enterprises, the milk industry in Dongxihu district dropped to the lowest level in 1998, with only 1000 ones on hand.
Shanghai Bright and Youzhiyou had entered into Dongxihu district in succession in 1999, leading the breeding of milk cow from scattered farmers to breeding subzones, so milk cow breeding here began to step into the “Subzone times”.
You will see the situation like this if you are walking in any breeding subzones of Dongxihu district: pipe type milking machine operated and controlled by computer are dominant and the manual milking before is found nowhere.
The farming expert at the district introduces that there are three advantages for breeding milk cow in subzone, one of which is mechanization.
In the past, for the scattered farmers, each of them cultivated several milk cows, and scores of cows at most, with small scale and the milking machine wasn’t required. Scattered breeding not only caused high cost, but also the second pollution to raw milk will be produced by hand milking, which made many milk farmers have great loss. The Subzone gathers thousands of milk cows, with a set of advanced and healthy milking equipment, which is easy and can save the cost at the same time.
The dejecta produced by a milk cow is 25 kg. At times of scattered farmers, it was difficult to collect cattle manure, so disposal became an empty talk. The farmers and cows lived together, and it was filled with scenes of stink to high heaven. In the breeding subzone, the biomass pool and organic fertilizer plant were set up, the cyclic utilization was popularized, and the cattle manure changed into treasure.
Uniform management, epidemic prevention and purchase carried out by the milk cow breeding subzone ensure the quality of milk source.
The annual output of an adult milk cow of Dongxihu district is less than 5 tons before 1999, which increased by 1 ton within less than 4 years since subzone breeding. Now Dongxihu district has executed “7-ton milk engineering”.
In Sept. 2005, the National Metropolis Livestock Raising Economy Annual Conference was hold in Wuhan by Ministry of Agriculture. One of the contents was to visit breeding subzone for popularizing Wuhan experience, and milk cow subzone of Dongxihu was the focus.
In the conference, the representatives all have borne in mind that “milk industry of Hubei focuses on Wuhan and that of Wuhan focuses on Dongxihu district”.
The speech given by the principal of Milk Source Dept. of Bright Milk is of representativeness: Bright Milk has dairy factories at different places in China, the yearly statistics shows that milk source provided by cow farmers of Dongxihu is the best.
Subzone breeding makes the milk industry of Dongxihu bullish. At present, market share of dairy products of the district reaches 70%, and they also radiate to five provinces in south China. From planting of green forage, cattle raising to processing and marketing of milk products, the milk industry chain collects 40000 persons for employment, and the average net income of cow farmer exceeds 20000 Yuan.
Original news from Changjiang Daily of May 28th, 2007 issue
