22 Apr 2025

In the early morning as the world awakens from its slumber, soft colourful sunrise hues diffuse in a breath-taking spectacle of beauty and grandeur at Milk Valley Farm, former Milk Afric in Lobatse.

A drive into this beautiful dairy farm offers a picturesque scenery of a refreshing escape into nature. Gentle breeze wheezes about as one meanders on the paved road up and down the valley gradually descending into lush emerald landscape. Calming, serene melodious chirping of birds and cow moos fill the senses as one approaches the regal white charming farm buildings and astounding heaps of straw.

In here, there is a beehive of activity in a highly technologically driven enterprise. Workers on shift stand alert in positions, each with a special role to play in the mass scale milking duty where over a hundred dairy cows come matching majestically to the state of the art automated cow milking rotary parlor with a capacity of holding 72 dairy cows per milking session.

The dairy cows enter the complex milking machine which is complete with teat cups, vacuum pumps, milk lines, milk receptacles, and systems for cleaning and sanitizing the equipment twice a day, at 6am and 6pm. 

The smart milking technology produces frothy fresh milk which is then stored in tanks for daily deliveries and collections.

“Milk Valley Farm is Botswana’s flagship dairy project wholly owned by Botswana Development Corporation (BDC) aligned to Botswana’s economic diversification goals playing a crucial role in reducing Botswana’s reliance on imported dairy products.

 We are currently at Phase I of the project which initially started in 2013,” says project interim General Manager, Mr Onkemetse Bareki.

The dairy farm started as a Public and Private Partnership, between Mr Philemon Matibe and Lobatse Town Council; BDC came on board around 2017. The dairy cows were procured locally in Pitsane about two years ago. The farm boasts of an animal population of 262 consisting of high yielding breeds such as Holstein Friesian, Guernsey, Jersey, Brown Swiss and Ashires.

“Originally from Holland, Holstein Friesian is a breed that produces more milk, the Guernsey and the Jerseys comes second to them in terms of milk production. The Jerseys are known for their better fat content, if you want to make ice cream, cheese then obviously you go for the breed with better butter fat content,” Mr Bareki explained.

According to Mr Bareki, the farm employs 18 Batswana including four women of which a half a dozen of them trained in the United States of America for a year. At full capacity, the farm will generate over 250 direct and indirect jobs. The project can accommodate over 2,000 milking cows, each with a daily production capacity of over 20 liters of milk. However, due to the import ban on cloven-hoofed animals from South Africa, herd expansion has been a challenge. To deal with the challenge, the farm developed a breeding plan, which includes procurement of sexed semen from cows with superior genetics and sourcing cows from local farmers.

“We produce milk daily and the bulk goes to Choppies, which procures about 6 000 liters per a week, 2 000 liters per week goes to a yoghurt manufacturing company in Molepolole, a company that makes sour milk gets around 2 000 liters per week, and community members who buy the remaining milk. We sell our milk at P7.50 per liter,” he noted. The milk is tested by Department of Veterinary services every Tuesday for compliance to the public safety standards.

Even though the project is up and running, it is faced challenges. “Our biggest challenge is procurement of cattle, we cannot get cattle anywhere in the SADC region due to red zones because of the outbreak of foot and Mouth. We targeted to procure more animals from South Africa but it is a challenge. We are currently doing artificial insemination; we bought sexed semen, which will give us a better ratio of female cows. We have 64 dry cows, 40 of them were pregnant from the bulls while 20 were artificially inseminated,” said Mr Bareki.

He said milk consumption in Botswana stood at 120 million liters per annum but the local dairy farmers were only satisfying 10 per cent of the demand. “We are still at infancy; the industry is still crawling so that is how huge milk production is. Here we produce over 2 000 liters per day,” he said.

Mr Bareki said that dairy farming was a capital-intensive venture and they spend around P200 000 per month on feeds, “Our biggest challenge is feed costs, the lactating cows feed differently. In the morning we give them 600kg of Lucerne, 500kg of maize bran, 8kg molasses, 50kg of soya oil cake, 40kg of dairy concentrates, and 400kg of brewer’s bran for all the 102 lactating cows. It is quite expensive to achieve that,” he says. He encouraged Batswana to plant animal feed to address a challenge they face to feed stock. “If we increase animal head we will need sufficient feed rations. We are exploring ways of going into contract farming with farmers to be able to manage what animals feed on,” said Mr Bareki. 

He expressed optimism at going into Phase II of the project upon completion of phase I which he noted would entail construction of four cow houses to be able to carry about 3 000 dairy cows to operate at full capacity to be able to supply sufficient milk to the nation. ENDS