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DAIRY FARMING IN NIGERIA: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Article · July 2020

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Elijah Ayandele
Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel
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 DAIRY FARMING IN NIGERIA: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE.
Considering the wide gap between the Nigerian ever growing population and its rising demand
for the available dairy products, one is forced to seek to know when the nation will significantly
improve domestic production to meet consumption. According to statistics provided by the
National Livestock Transformation, Nigeria, and ridiculously so, produces 526,000 litres as
against the demand for about 1.2 million litres per annum. Hence, the country has been
reportedly paying close to a whooping sum of $1.3 billion annually on importing powdered
milk to be re-constituted into various products.

The past decades

Literatures and records of events show that modern dairy production (averagely sustainable) in
Nigeria is dated back to about 2-3 decades ago. It is within this period that Shonga Dairies
located in Tsonga, Edu Local Government in Kwara State, the basic reference of this article,
was birthed. During this period, the government policy on backward integration for processors
was to source 5% raw materials locally.

According to a story published on Reuters in 2011 with the title ‘Zimbabwe farmers, a boom
for Nigeria agriculture,” the Kwara State Government under Dr. Bukola Saraki received white
farmers who were ejected from Zimbabwe by the late President Robert Mugabe. A thousand
hectares of land was allocated to each farmer, 5 of which formed dairy milk clusters. They were
reported to have the capacity to produce around 50,000 litres of milk daily, hoping to bridge a
significant gap in the domestic production and supply of raw milk to a dairy industry feeding
Nigerians with apparently inferior powdered milk. That was promising! About 800 gravid
jersey cows were imported from South Africa and multi-million facilities were set up. However,
as of 2013 when I interned at one of the dairy farms, only an average of about 2,500-3,000 litres
were delivered to the central collection plant where Friesland Campina WAMCO came to pick
them and moved to Lagos every two days.

Shonga Dairies was supposed to be the biggest establishment delivering raw milk to processors
and replication of its structure would have seen Nigerians consume healthy, hygienically
processed milk. This would have also reduced importation of dairy products significantly.

On the other hand, there are a few other privately owned dairy farms in Nigeria which are about
70% domiciled in the North-Central part of the country. I visited 3 of them in 3 different states.
Integrated Dairy Limited (Farmfresh) in Vom, Jos, Plateau Sate was incorporated in April 2003.
The farm which reportedly operates on 550 hectares of land has about 500 Holstein Friesian
cattle which are well adapted to the cold Plateau climate. Nagari Dairies located in Nassarawa
State was also a fast-growing private farm in the last decade. It claimed to be operating on 1,200
hectares of land and has a herd of 7,000 Holstein cattle. Like Integrated Dairies, Nagari Dairies
also makes a very good yoghurt. However, on my visit to the farm in 2018, the farm’s fortune
seemed to be on a decline. Maizube farms located in Niger State is owned by the former Head
of State, Abdusalam Abubakar. The farm operates on a hundred of hectares and houses
hundreds of foreign cattle breed and cross breeds.

Most privately owned dairy farms belong to politicians and some people believe that most of
these farms have been able to stay afloat due to injection of funds from public purse, quite
several emerging dairy farms have already shutdown due to paucity of funds after politicians
owning them left office.

Some private farms have also been able to do successful crossbreeding of their foreign milk
type animals with our local animals. However, they are all involved in value addition,
processing their milk into yoghurt, cheese, cream, etc. It becomes impossible to deliver to
processors because the cost of production is too high compared to the global farm gate price at
which processors are willing to buy milk. If this trend continues, it means all private farms will
continue to process their milk and processors will only be left with depending on milk sourced
from herders and agro-pastoralists for processing.

Today

As I write today, the 5 cluster dairy farms of Shonga Dairies are a shadow of themselves. The
massive investments in the past decade has gone down the drain. During my last visit in 2015,
at least 3 of the farmers already left while the remaining 2 are possibly drawing their exit plan.
Though I do not want to talk about the financial misadventure and terms’ inconsistencies and
failure that led to this fatality, it is important to mention that for a Public-Private-Partnership as
such, it is crucial that the terms are transparent so that successive government can easily
continue with the project.

This failure seems to be recurring and consistent when compared to how in 1992, a census
undertaken for processing plants built by the government put the number of plants to 63 across
the country. According to the National Livestock Project Division in a 1992 National Dairy
Survey, most of these plants are no more functional and never delivered any return on
investment.
The only source of raw materials for processors today remain agro-pastoralists/herders. Their
production is inefficient, inconsistent and unhygienic. There is a need for more community of
milk producers, and collaborations to produce efficiently to be able to deliver to processors.
Without this, bulk of our dairy consumption will still be imported, and unabated foreign
reserves depletion will continue.

What this means for Nigeria

If this cycle of wastes continues, we will spend more money importing inferior dairy products
and will never get to develop our local dairy industry. The massive dairy market will remain
untapped, just as we will have millions of unemployed individuals that could be productive in
building the dairy industry.

The new government policy and the potential impacts

In a report published earlier this year, the Central Bank of Nigeria listed the 6 companies
licensed to import milk and its products into the country. These include FrieslandCampina
WAMCO, Chi Limited, TG Arla Dairy Products Ltd, Promasidor Nig. Ltd., Nestle Nig. Plc and
Integrated Dairies Ltd. These are the companies that keyed into the backward integration policy
(revised) of the federal government, demanding that 10% of their raw materials (milk) be
locally sourced. This is to improve local production and develop the country dairy industry
gradually. FrieslandCampina WAMCO started the backward integration before now and an
impressive transformation has been witnessed in the local dairy sector with social and economic
development as evidence.

What we should be doing towards the next 10 years

Breeding - Nigeria cattle population is reportedly estimated to be around 20 million and less
than 2 million are producing milk. These 2 million have an average production of about 550,000
litres per annum, with a poor production of 1 litre per cow. If in the next 10 years we hope to
significantly bridge the gap between local production and importation, we should be (cross)
breeding aggressively now. Records from offspring of successful crosses between milk type
breed like Holstein and our native white Fulani showed average of 10 litres of milk per day
being produced. With 3 million of these offspring before 2030, we can be confident of
producing about 70% of our consumed milk. For this to happen, we must be deliberate and
long-term oriented.

Unfortunately, cross breeding success in Nigeria is poor especially via artificial insemination
technique. I had direct conversations with many farmers who are now willing to buy dairy breed
bulls as an alternative. This means stakeholders in the industry must be ready to invest in
training experts abroad. A two-week visit to Netherlands is never going to be enough to learn
the art of economically viable and sustainable dairy production and management. There are lots
of scholarships available to students across multiple fields which has not amounted to much
meaningful progress in such fields. Sadly, a promising field like Agriculture has little or none
of such. It is not possible to grow by chance. I should also add that a strong research and
development laboratory must be created for the dairy sector and be utilized by these trained
experts so that they will be able to catch up with global developments and trends in the industry.
The result of this will be adequate training of livestock extension agents that will be able to
train agro-pastoralists and herders on hygienic milking procedures, so that our food safety is
well guaranteed. WAMCO and a few processors are doing a good job establishing milk
collection centres to offtake milk from agro-pastoralists. However, it is impossible to rule out
the possibility of most of this milk failing microbial and somatic cells count test – these, coupled
with fat and protein percentage form the legislation definition of milk in Europe and other
developed nations and, this being the standard, ours should not be different.

Another crucial point to focus on is feed availability which may cause major shifts in production
seasonally. We need to start growing lots of pastures, fed on irrigation if need be. This will
reduce the traditional nomadism and allow herders to embrace ranching – which is a needed
program if we want to improve our livestock industry and reduce herders-farmers clash to the
barest minimum.

In conclusion, it is important that as individual, conglomerates, and organizations are eager to

invest in the dairy industry, establishing a strong dairy farmer cooperative will be necessary. It
is noteworthy to mention that the major reason for the revolution in India dairy industry (India
is the second largest cattle milk producer in the world after the U.S.) was an efficient farmer’s
cooperative. In fact, some of the top world dairy processing companies are cooperative owned.
An example is Amul in India jointly owned by about 3.6 million milk producers in Gujarat.
Fonterra in New Zealand, Arla foods in Sweden and Denmark, FrieslandCampina in Netherland
are other common examples. Dairy cooperatives are perfect examples of actors of policies and
are important stakeholders when it comes to making decisions that affect them. It also makes
elimination of middlemen easy and enables market and price determination and regulation. It
is also important than the government provide subsidies for farmers because dairy farming is
rarely profitable. This probably explains why farmers in countries with favourable weather and
high yielding cattle breed still enjoy good subsidies from their government; Nigeria should do
the same.
 Adekunle E. Ayandele,
Dairy Scientist.
Christian Albrechts University, Kiel.

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