Region 10 officials welcome dairy farm operations at Moblissa

The Demerara Distillers Limited (DDL), in partnership with the LR Group of Israel, is mulling the establishment of a modern dairy farm operations at Moblissa, a small community located on the Linden Soesdyke Highway.
The operation is designed to supply DDL’s TOPCO milk plant with fresh cows’ milk for pasteurisation and packaging, and will produce over four million litres of fresh milk per year when operationalised.
The multi-million dollar project would require approximately 600 acres of land, create about 60 jobs and see the importation of 500 pregnant heifers to supply the milk production and will produce up to 1200 liters of milk daily.

Last week, the team met with Regional Chairman Deron Adams, to share thoughts on a proposed project. At the meeting, Chairman of the RDC Agricultural Committee Mark Goring, was also present. The visiting team consisted of Demerara Distillers Limited Managing Director Ramesh Persaud, DDL Government Affairs Consultant Wesley Kirton and Rami Ofer of LR Group of Israel. The group is currently sourcing land at Moblissa while studying the feasibility of executing the project. In addition to job creation and other economic spin-offs, the community is also expected to benefit from the introduction of new technologies and different cow breeds. “This project has the RDC’s full support, we welcome development of this nature and we encourage investors to consider Region 10, a region that is strategically located, has vast investment advantages such as land, low electricity rates and human resource, to invest here so that our people can be employed and spin-off industries can benefit,” Regional Chairman Deron Adams said in an invited comment.

Speaking at a press conference at the recently concluded Agri-Investment Forum and Expo at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre, representatives from DDL and the LR Group explained that land sourcing has been a major issue.
Once the land is identified, it is expected that the setting up of the farm should take within two years to complete. The investors are ready to begin work on the land immediately once this has been procured. The dairy production is part of the diversification of DDL’s TOPCO facilities.
“While we designed a facility to package juice, Guyana was importing most of its milk at a significant cost, so we decided to build in the features to be able to pack [the] milk and supply the domestic market. As an interim measure, we are reconstituting powdered milk but the goal has always been to integrate backwards into the domestic dairy sector,” Samaroo noted.
The dairy farm project will be utilizing a zero grazing system, which means that the animals would be enclosed in their shed in cooling environments, and not be grazed outdoors.
This system, Ofer explained, would enable the cows to save energy which they can use to alternatively increase their milk production.
“Instead of the cows grazing on the land, we will be taking part of the land usually used by cows and we will be doing some cultivation system for forage crops that will be served to the animals at the table in the shed.
“They don’t go out, they don’t waste any energy searching for food; all of their energy is for milk production. In this way, we can produce more milk from a smaller units of production,” Ofer noted.