Just under half of Zimbabwe’s dairy requirements are imported, so we are paying foreign farmers to milk foreign cows when it is feasible to build our dairy industry on the basis of smallholder farmer groups sharing a lot of the required infrastructure equipment at the collection point and the necessary transport.

The dairy industry, as with most of the more capital-intensive farming, was built in Zimbabwe in the large-scale commercial sector with a modest number of farmers with large herds and mechanical milking machines, the required refrigeration on farm and the required delivery tankers to get the cold milk to the major processors and distributors.

Commercial dairying had started in a far more humble fashion. The original owners of Glen Lorne and Greendale farms started dairy farming in a small way in the later 1890s, getting their mule-carts or ox-carts into the town centre early in the morning to sell fresh milk.

When the railway arrived farmers as far away as Marondera, but not much further, would get their churns and butter packs to the station early in the morning to catch the Mutare-Harare train.

With the growth of the sector there was growing centralisation of marketing and distribution and eventually almost all the small private dairies were bought out and farmers sold directly to the main parastatal marketing board who then did the processing and pasteurisation, made the butter and cheese, filled the bottles and sold the products.

This industrial farming worked, but only in that economic context. The switch to smaller farms means that Zimbabwe now needs to build a different sort of dairy industry. This is quite possible. Europe, a continent with a high level of dairy products in its people’s diets, produces most of its milk on quite small farms and as a glance into any French cheese shop will show, does a lot of speciality processing in communities rather than cities.

There are requirements when small-scale farmers move into dairy. It is almost impossible to this by yourself. Basically a group of 20 to 50 farmers, living fairly close to each other, has to be involved with a common collection point, probably owning a truck that can race round the arms each morning collecting the churns, and the required refrigeration at the collection point.

Zimbabwe is a warm tropical country so speed in getting milk from cow to fridge is essential, before processing is done to extend the shelf life. Hygiene, always important in dairy farming, becomes critical.

Fresh unprocessed milk is a very perishable product. Among other things this means that all the farmers in any group of smallholders have to ensure that they all follow the best practice; it requires just one dodgy farmer to ruin the day’s production of the entire group.

From a business-production point of view building up the required groups of small-scale dairy farmers is a challenge, but one that is viable.

Government has some schemes. There is a good working group now in Guruve with around 50 farmers who all are near neighbours and have built up the skills, and another has been started in Murombedzi. There is a cow and a calf scheme to help build the herds.

A private company, Nestle Zimbabwe, has over the last five years helped start three groups of small-scale farmers get established, a business move it took because it needs Zimbabwean milk to justify the investment made at its factory, and to justify any further investment. Nestle does not sell fresh milk; it uses milk as one of the raw materials in its range of products.

And, being part of a global giant, it cannot import fresh milk as that raw material. Instead it has to import the bulk processed products and is restricted to packaging and distribution, since it is easier to run an extra shift at a factory in a country where there is enough milk and export the finished product than import the milk into Zimbabwe.

So the Zimbabwean factory had a very high incentive to get involved in boosting local production.

The problems in both the Government and private schemes were large. First there was the need to find the required group of farmers who either knew something about dairy farming or were keen and willing to be trained.

Most Zimbabwean farmers know about cattle, but there is a lot more that a dairy farmer needs to learn.

In fact with each new group someone who know dairy needs to be readily available, but here the Government with its building up of Agritex can help.

Then there was the need for meeting certain basic essentials, such as totally clean milking sheds on farms, having the churns and knowing how to keep churns clean, the central collection point and the necessary transport to get the milk to the collection point quickly.

The collection point needs electricity, although these days solar-powered refrigeration is available.

Hygienic dairy farming requires a lot of clean water, so boreholes with pumps are a must. Dairy cattle need a lot of extra feed, in fact the feeding is about three quarters the cost of dairy, so farmers need to grow, under irrigation, as much of their own food as possible to keep costs down.

All this might seem to be a deterrent but dairy farmers have one advantage that most farmers can only dream about. Their cashflow, if they run their business well, is wonderful, like every day, every week and every month. So there is a major incentive.

Nestle has shown that private business can make money by empowering and helping small-scale farmers, and most of the equipment that those farmers need is provided by Zimbabwean companies.

The Government schemes have also led the way. To build the new dairy sector that Zimbabwe needs, now simply requires that public and private partnership to grow, bringing in likely groups of farmers.

In time there is more business. Already there are a handful of artisan cheesemakers in Zimbabwe, who produce premium products, quite often at a premium mark-up. So there are openings as we build the industry to have similar producers attached to groups of farmers. That is why France has hundreds of speciality cheeses.

Economically it does not matter for most agricultural products if a sector is built on a few big businesses or thousands of small businesses. What does matter is that they are businesses, operating properly with their customer put first.