The country’s milk production increased by 9% in 2019 as it recorded 40 million liters from 36 million liters, the milk producers association of Malawi has said.
The increase has been attributed to good care of the livestock by cooperatives according to Herbert Chagona the Executive director of the association.
“Our production increased it used to be 82 000 liters a day but last year it was 89 000 litters a day which means raw milk alone contributed over 7.7 billion kwacha to the economy before processors added value to the milk,” Chagona said.
The improvement comes at a time the association is encouraging its members to embrace the use of clean energy as solar which is said to be more effective than hydroelectric power.
“We are trying to organize our cooperatives to embrace clean energy after we proved that it is an effective way of cooling milk because we observed that this method is three times faster than the other means.
“This means farmers can save a lot of money and realize better profits from their dairy business,” Chagona said.
Meanwhile, cooperatives continue to complain of relatively lower prices, now averaging 195 kwacha per liter which according to Chagona is below the cost of production.
