US$16M DDL Dairy Farm to produce milk by February 2025

…annual target set at 5 million litres

The first state-of-the-art dairy farm for the Caribbean, a US$16 million investment by Demerara Distillers Limited (DDL), is on course to produce milk by February next year.
In February 2023, DDL subsidiary Tropical Orchard Product Company Limited (TOPCO) and the LR Group of Israel had signed an agreement that paved the way for the setting up of Demerara Dairies Inc (DDI) in Guyana.
A tour of its operations at Moblissa along the Soesdyke-Linden Highway on Friday gave an insight on the scope of works completed thus far, and how automation and technology will revolutionise the dairy industry in Guyana.
Director of Technical Services, Sharon Sue-Hang disclosed, “We’re expecting this project to be completed and having milk by February of 2025. We want to strengthen the dairy production in Guyana and Caricom with high-quality milk and replace the current importation which amounts to about US$34 million.

Apart from infrastructural works, acquisition of equipment, and transportation logistics are ongoing to interface smoothly with the existing TOPCO operations.
It is projected that five million litres of milk will be produced per annum. The company has already acquired 250 acres of land from the 500-acre target, for which operations will span over 900 animals in Phase One of the project. A portion of the land would be used for growing feed stock such as grass, corn and legumes.
“Each cow will produce 10,000 litres of milk per year and the system that we have is to milk the cows three times a day. The milking system will be automatic and then we will have an advanced management system to monitor all the production, all the practices. We will detect any health issues when the cow is in heat and things like that,” Sue-Hang detailed.

The cows will be fed in accordance with nutritional standards set out for the industry to yield high outputs of milk. Once the milking aspect has been completed at the farm, it will be transported in refrigerated tanks to the DDL Diamond plant, which has a capacity to package about 18,000 litres of milk per day.
DDL Group Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Komal Samaroo relayed that keeping with the thrust of food security, a decision was taken in 2018 to establish a modern processing and Tetra Pak facility to not just process fruit, but pasteurise and process milk. This came at a price tag of $4 billion.
Producing milk by reconstituting imported powder milk commenced two years ago and it was the first stage of a process to establish a trusted brand, which will later be supported by the farm.

“Around the world where food security is an important thing, milk is a highly subsidised commodity…Guyana has been importing all its milk. We import about US$35 million a year in milk – a lot of it, powdered milk. As we were setting up our TOPCO packaging operation, we spent a lot of time thinking through the competitiveness of what we were doing. We wanted to, while we build a brand and create a market, to work on that backward integration and do it in a competitive way.”
Meanwhile, Minister within the Public Works Ministry, Deodat Indar admitted that the global hunger crisis places significant emphasis on the dire need of ensuring food security as he lauded this project.
Indar acknowledged, “We had an industry back in the day that used to produce some amount of milk but how it is being done now by DDL and the LR Group is a total different technology. And I am happy to see that technology transfer.”

Employment
Once operationalised, approximately 70 direct jobs will be created from this facility and 150 indirect jobs. This number will grow as the project expands.
Debra Cornelius-Todd, a resident of Moblissa, shared their woes of unemployment in the community for some time, creating a domino effect of school dropouts and poverty. With such a project, she is hopeful that the community can benefit from meaningful opportunities.
The elderly woman told the media, “I am grateful and happy that this project has come to Moblissa…We only have a few Government workers in here and that’s what people need. They need jobs. We had a lot of children dropping out because of jobs. Their parents didn’t have jobs and couldn’t maintain them. So, I am happy that the community is getting an opportunity like this.” (G12)