Milk influx from rural-Gujarat forces Amul to lean on private dairies in MP, Rajasthan & Maharashtra

He said that past experiences have shown that milk procurement during drought years increases as the farmer’s income from agriculture declines and he tends to concentrates on producing more milk.

GCMMF which had a daily milk collection average of 148 lakh litres in 2014-15, currently is handling 205 lakh litres of milk per day. GCMMF is in the process of setting up “India’s biggest milk powder drying plant” at a cost of Rs 450 crore at the Mother Dairy, Gandhinagar (a unit of GCMMF) which will have a capacity of 150 metric tonne per day. The expansion at Gandhinagar includes installation of two milk processing lines of 50 KLPH, an additional 80 MTPD ghee processing and packing line and a 50 MTPD butter manufacturing line.

“Last year, the quantum of milk we had sent out for processing was not even one-third of what we are sending out of Gujarat this year… Milk has come more than our expectations. This is because of our good price (been given to milk producing farmers),” Sodhi said adding that GCMMF has not increased the prices of milk and milk products for the last one-and-half-years.

Explaining how better prices of milk offered by GCMMF has contributed to increase in milk procurement, he said, “Only Gujarat farmers are fortunate that they are getting good prices of milk. They are getting 3-5 percent more price of milk, whereas farmers in other parts of India and the world are getting 20-50 percent lower price compared to last year. The prices of dairy commodities all over the world have crashed. For instance, farmers in New Zealand are getting less than 50 percent of what they were getting last year, while their counterparts in Maharashtra, Punjab and Haryana are getting 30-40 lower prices of milk.”

According to him, farmers in Gujarat have been getting more remuneration, largely because GCMMF converts 95 percent of the milk collected through it’s cooperative network to value-added products, “where prices have not gone down.”

“The next generation farmers do not want to stay in villages and follow the traditional ways of producing milk. So we are promoting commercial dairy farming. We are training them in diary and farm management, animal husbandry, better feeding practices, milking by machines, etc.” he said adding 4700 youths have been trained in Gujarat by GCMMF and there are more than 40,000 commercial diary farms that are being operated by the youths in the state.

“For the next 10 years, our emphasis will be on India, where we will concentrate on rural parts. India can become dairy for the world, by exporting. So our emphasis has be here… Moreover, India is surrounded by countries who are milk-deficit and will remain so for the next 20-30 years. So we have got markets adjoining us,” Sodhi added.