Thursday 20 September 2012

Sept 19th Salem Dairy & Silk Production

 
Our host was Shane Whittaker an Ozi expat who is a specalist in dairy heard development with Hatsun Agro Pty Ltd, an Indian Dairy processor.
The size of Indian dairy heards vary from 1 cow to 800 cows. We visited a typical farm which had 10 cows of which 8 were milking. The cows are housed in sheds and all their feed was hand cut and bought to them.  As with most small farms the dairy heard was only a sideline, they also had a yarn spinning business, grew coconuts and other crops.





One quite interesting thing was the small simple bio digester which was used to produce gas for cooking in the house, with future plans to generate electricity. Pictured below,it was powered by a slurry of cow manure and water poured into the hollow pipe on the left. As gas is produced it builds up pressure in the membrane under the tyres and is piped out via the blue hose, to the house, quite simple but effective.



Milk is collected by milk cans as it was in Australia 50 years ago, it takes about 4hrs from milking till it reaches the factory, no cold chain here until it is chilled in the factory. 


Hatsuns dairy processing factory was amazing, I especially enjoyed the ice creamery (The icecream was fantastic to) In this part of the factory they used 50,000lt of milk per day to make icecream, mostly packaged in small single serve containers, that’s a lot of icecreams. I have included some video fottage so you can understand the scale of labour used in this area of the factory. I appologise for the footage quality, I’m still learning how to use my camera.



Silk Worm Farm

We visited another small mixed farm which had a silk worm enterprise, these hungry little suckers plough through Mulberry leaves like you wouldn’t believe. They produce their famous silk cocoons in just 30 days from hatching. An interesting fact is that the warmer the temperatures the yellower the silk produced, with the pale silk offering the highest prices.


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