IT’S late afternoon and a frigid breeze is blowing off Bohai Bay in eastern China, as an Australian dairy cow is prepped for milking. A farm hand guides the distinctive black-and-white beast on to a raised circular platform before cleaning and priming the udder.
It’s not «milking time» as such at farm Number Three on the barren coastal planes of Shandong province, as this operation never stops.
At the AustAsia Modern Dairy, 160 cows are milked every eight minutes in a process that runs for 20 hours each day – the other four hours are used for cleaning.
That means in just three rotations of its platforms, this farm produces more milk than the average Australian dairy farm would in a day. And that’s before counting AustAsia’s two nearby farms, which also run 10,000 cattle each.
«You would never dream of doing anything on this scale at home,» says the company’s Australian chief executive, Edgar Collins.
Yet AustAsia is only just getting started in China. Farm Number Four, at a cost of $US60 million ($63.4 million), is set to open early next year, while Number Five is in the design phase and will be completed at the end of 2014.
At that point, the pan-Asian diary group will have invested more than $US300 million in China and have around 55,000 cattle in its herd.
That will make it easily bigger than any Australian or New Zealand dairy farm, before even considering its Indonesian operation, which has a further 6500 cows and a regional fresh milk business.
Yet despite its size, the story of AustAsia and Collins is barely known outside the dairy industry. This is surely set to change, as there is no hotter global trend at present than the combination of China and dairy.
The battle for the Australian-listed Warrnambool Cheese and Butter (WCB) epitomises this mega trend, which is all about rising demand from China’s increasingly wealthy consumers.
This fact alone has seen WCB’s valuation double to $475 million since July as Canadian, Japanese and local players look to lock in supply on expectations of a big payday in China.
Source: The Land
