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Journalism of Courage
The government’s latest Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES) for 2022-23 shows milk emerging as India’s top food spend item, both in rural and urban areas.
The monthly value of milk and dairy products consumed by an average person in rural India, at Rs 314, was ahead of vegetables (Rs 203), cereals (Rs 185), egg, fish & meat (Rs 185), fruits (Rs 140), edible oil (Rs 136), spices (Rs 113) and pulses (Rs 76).
The HCES data reveals the same for urban India: Milk (Rs 466), fruits (Rs 246), vegetables (Rs 245), cereals (Rs 235), egg, fish & meat (Rs 231), edible oil (Rs 153), spices (Rs 138) and pulses (Rs 90).
Indians spending more on milk – viewed as a “superior” food – is good news for the dairy industry, especially farmers. But this could face headwinds from two sources.
The first relates to consumer demand itself from inflation. The all-India modal (most-quoted) price of milk has gone up from Rs 42 to Rs 60 per litre in the last five years, according to the department of consumer affairs. Much of the increase – from Rs 52 to Rs 60 – has happened in the last one year alone.
The second has to do with the cost of fodder, feed and raw materials/ingredients. As these have increased significantly (see table), dairies have had to hike procurement prices paid to farmers and, in turn, pass-through the same to consumers.
There’s a limit to how much more the consumer can pay for milk without it causing demand destruction. If farmer incomes are to be raised without shrinking domestic demand and eroding the global competitiveness of the Indian dairy industry, the only solution is to reduce the cost of milk production.
One way is to boost milk yield per animal through genetic improvement and new breeding technologies.
A typical crossbred cow giving birth first at 24-30 months can produce 5-7 calves over its lifetime. The normal breeding route, whether natural or via artificial insemination (AI), would result in only 50% of these being female calves or future milk-producing cows. But with the use of sex-sorted (SS) semen, there is a 90%-plus probability of only female calves being born, as against 50:50 with conventional semen.
The Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers’ Union, better known as Amul, performed 13.91 lakh AIs of its farmers’ cows in 2022-23 (April-March). Out of that, 2.86 lakh or 20.5% were based on SS semen. “We are targeting the ratio at 30% by 2024-25,” said Amit Vyas, managing director of the union. Roughly every third AI leads to conception. With 90% female calves, it means more cows than bulls down the line.
A good cow, even with SS semen, can produce, at best, 5-6 as-good future milkers. That’s where embryo transfer (ET) technology, to exploit the high genetic merit (HGM, i.e. milking potential) of an existing cow, comes in.
ET entails injecting follicle-stimulating hormone in cows to make them release multiple ova (eggs) in a single estrous cycle. These ova – numbering 4-6 in Jersey, 6-8 in Holstein Friesian (HF) and 10-15 in Gir cows – are fertilised by sperms from the semen of a proven genetically-superior bull. The fertilised eggs (zygotes) are, then, collected from inside the donor cow and transferred for implanting in the uteruses of multiple recipient animals. Multiple ovulation and ET, thus, enables production of several calves from a single HGM cow. With 6 such procedures, each yielding 6 viable embryos, and 33-35% conception rate, it would result in some 12 calves being born from every donor cow per year.
A more recent technology involves extracting the oocytes or immature ova directly from the cow’s ovaries using an aspiration pump. The oocytes – about 10-50 can be collected from each ovary at a time – are kept in an incubator for 24 hours to develop into ova. In this case, the fertilisation of the mature ova takes place in vitro, i.e. outside the cow’s body, in a petri-dish where the sperms are introduced. The zygotes formed remain in the in vitro culture medium for another six days, before ready for transfer to the recipient cows. With 20 procedures, 5 viable embryos per procedure and 33-35% conception, there can be 33-35 calves per donor cow per year. This is as compared with 5-7 calves during its entire lifetime through normal breeding!
Amul, in March 2020, opened a Bovine Breeding Centre at Mogar in Gujarat’s Anand district. The objective was to breed a nucleus herd of HGM bulls and cows, whose superior semen and in vitro-fertilised embryos frozen at minus 196 degrees Celsius, could be used for AI or transferring into the animals of farmers.
The Centre, set up with an investment of Rs 15 crore, has so far produced 170 male and 180 female animals through in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and ET technology. These include exotic (HF and Jersey giving 10,000-12,000 litres and 7,000-10,000 litres of milk respectively per year), HF-Gir and HF-Sahiwal crossbred (5,000-7,000 litres) and indigenous Gir, Sahiwal and Murrah buffalo (3,000-4,000 litres) breeds.
“By AI and SS semen, we are exploiting male genetics. In IVF-ET, we are exploiting female genetics of the donor cow,” explained Gopal Shukla, manager (animal husbandry projects) at Amul. The Kaira union has already taken IVF-ET technology to its farmers’ doorstep, with 63 pregnancies and 13 calvings recorded up till now.
Other member unions of the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation have also followed suit. Bhavnaben Chaudhary, who supplies around 150 litres of milk daily to the Banaskantha District Co-operative Milk Producers’ Union, has a 4.5-month-old pure Kankrej calf born through IVF-ET to a surrogate HF-Kankrej crossbred mother.
“I went for a Kankrej, as its milk has higher fat (4.5-5% versus 4% for regular crossbred) and solids-not-fat (9% versus 8.5%) content. Even if yields are less, I should get a better price with lower feeding and maintenance cost as well,” said this woman farmer from Akedi village in Banaskantha’s Palanpur taluka, who rears 15 cows, 7 buffaloes and 6 calves.
Genetics apart, there is intervention required to bring down feeding costs of animals. This should be done by farmers cultivating high-yielding protein-rich green fodder grasses and reducing reliance on expensive compound cattle feed and oil-meal concentrates.
Amul is putting up a 30-tonnes-per-day Total Mixed Ration (TMR) plant at Sarsa in Anand. TMR will contain dry and green fodder, along with concentrates, vitamins and mineral mixtures, in a ready-to-eat mashed form for animals. It would save farmers the cost of purchasing and storing fodder separately, and administering it in addition to cattle feed. The plan is to source the fodder from farmer producer organisations, whose members would exclusively grow maize, jowar, hybrid napier or oat grass and make their silage for using in the TMR plant.
The focus of White Revolution 2.0 would clearly have to be on lowering the cost of producing milk at the farm-gate, as opposed to increasing procurement prices year after year.
