Joyce Ntikhe is a small-scale dairy farmer in Malawi who invested in cows to generate income for her family. While dairy farming has helped support her household, high feed costs and low milk prices mean the proceeds are not adequate. A local cooperative called Umodzi Milk Processors Cooperative, supported by an EU-funded project, is working to organize small-scale farmers and create a new market for processed milk to increase farmers' incomes. The project aims to improve livelihoods in rural Malawi through sustainable intensification of food production and value chains.

1. Newsletter
Happenings
In-house version 2 July 2021, No.1913
A version of this story first appeared in The Daily Times in Malawi
In the media
Pursuing money in milk
File photo, ICRISAT
Joyce Ntikhe, 41, is a budding dairy farmer at Chipendo
village in the area of Traditional Authority January in
the southern district of Thyolo, Malawi. A few years ago,
she invested in her first dairy cow as a way of making
money for herself and her family. Today, Joyce has three
cows and hopes to increase the size of the herd in the
coming years. While dairy farming has helped support
her household, it does not provide enough always.
Cost of feed is high and efforts to get it are costing
farmers a lot of time and money, especially during the
dry season. Therefore, production is low and proceeds
from milk are not adequate, and farmers cannot afford
to drink milk themselves. Being a small farmer in a
remote area, farmers like Joyce rely on established
processors to sell the milk they produce. Like other
small-scale dairy farmers in Malawi, markets remain a
challenge.
“This area has many small-scale farmers but our
challenge remains good markets. Some buyers offer us
as little as MK 195 ($0.25) per liter. This is very little
compared to how much we need to feed and treat the
cows,” says the farmer, a mother of 5 children and
owner of 3 dairy cows.
A group of entrepreneurs turned into a cooperative for
farmers in the area to offer solutions to this challenge.
Umodzi Milk Processors Cooperative, a group of 168
milk processors, is now creating a new market for
farmers in the area.
With support from the European Union-funded Crop-
Livestock Integration and Marketing in Malawi (CLIM2
),
a project implemented by the International Crops
Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropic (ICRISAT),
Small Scale Livestock and Livelihoods Programme (SSLP)
and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI),
they have been organizing themselves to grow into a
vibrant cooperative.
Sabine Homann-Kee Tui, Coordinator for the CLIM2
project, explains that the project’s goal is to increase
income and livelihoods for small holders and rural
business entities, rural poor and rural youth through
sustainable intensification and diversification of
affordable plant and animal-based food production and
value chains.
Thyolo District is the largest producer of milk in Malawi.
Despite this, communities are only selling raw milk
which does not bring same returns as processed milk