A day in the life of one of our Maasai farmers, Elizabeth.
Video by Odd Couple Creative
Officially launched in September of 2012, the Livestock Co-op is a collaboration with a leading Kenyan cheese producer, Brown’s Cheese, which aims to provide farmers with a steady market and a fair wage for the sale of goat and sheep milk. Maai Mahiu and the surrounding Maasai regions are home to many farmers trying to sell milk from their livestock. Traditionally, these farmers have been required to travel long distances to sell the milk, with little profit for their efforts.
With this new program, CTC collects the milk directly from the farmers and transports it to Brown's Cheese. Thanks to the continued success of the cheese business, Brown’s Cheese has requested to buy as much milk from CTC as the farmers can make available. This project, headed by Eliud Kamau, has grown from collecting an average of 20 liters of milk per day to collecting an average of more than 70 liters of milk per day. There are currently 40+ farmers involved in the project and that number is expected to continue to grow. Additionally, the success of the program has enabled the opening of a second location in Suswa, making the program more available for our Maasai community.
A key piece of the program has been education. Farmers are taught best practices for maitaining the health of their livestock, how to collect the optimal amount of milk per day, how to collect the milk in a sanitary way and how produce and transport milk that meets industrcy standards.
Traditionally, farmers in the area have purchased dairy goats for milk production, which are very expensive and limit the profitability of producing milk. CTC has also worked to educate the farmers about a species of indigenous goats which are significantly cheaper, but are still productive in milk production. Moving forward, the goal is to cross breed the indigenous species with the dairy goats, providing a cheaper species with optimal milk production.
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