Milk in the city: profiles and development paths for urban dairy holders in Ethiopia

ABSTRACT

Demand for dairy products is growing fast in urban areas. Due to poorly developed rural infrastructure, urban dairy farms are pivotal in making milk available and affordable in towns and cities. Yet current supply fails to meet the increasing demand. In order to formulate fit interventions that can expand urban dairy production, a detailed understanding of urban dairy systems is needed. Using a cluster analysis approach, we profile 304 urban dairy farms in Mekelle, Northern Ethiopia, along three dimensions: input efficiency, market integration, and resilience towards demand seasonality. Our results suggest five distinctive farm types: surviving farms, processing female farms, young male entrepreneurs, established output-efficient farms, and established output-input-efficient farms. We observe large discrepancies in terms of dairy enterprise’s productivity, profitability, and suitability in future urban policy planning. For each of the identified dairy systems, we sketch potential intervention approaches that can feed into more tailored dairy development programmes.

KEYWORDS:

• Dairy production
• farm system
• intervention approach
• typology
• urban agriculture
• Ethiopia

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and their insightful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 To our knowledge, only one paper has specifically addressed peri-urban dairy diversity (i.e. Toure et al., 2015).

2 We did not collect data on the dry matter intake of dairy cows due to accuracy problems; as such we could not use the feed conversion rate. Farmers are more likely to accurately report feed costs, hence our choice for milk production:feed cost ratio.

3 Calculations based on our collected data from the dairy farmers revealed that 95% of the feed fed to the dairy herd is acquainted through purchase.

4 Average percentage of produced milk that is consumed by farming households amounts to barely 4% during Orthodox fasting. Fifteen per cent of the households indicated to give away milk for free, but only 16 out of the 304 interviewed farms indicated to give away milk more ‘frequently’, which was on average less than 2 L of fresh milk a week.

5 We did not include the maximum fresh milk price because of its smaller deviation across different farms. Moreover, when including this variable in the cluster analysis instead of the minimum fresh milk price, we came up with only two farmer clusters which showed high intracluster heterogeneity across several farm characteristics.

6 Atella is a liquid by-product from local beer production in Ethiopia.

7 Less than one-third of the farmers use both crop residues and hay.

8 Birr is the unit of currency in Ethiopia.

9 In our sample of 304 urban farms, only 4 farms sell other dairy produce besides butter (e.g. cheese, yoghurt or buttermilk). Moreover, only 12 farms had other buyers than neighbours (e.g. trader, retailer, or café).

10 The recently launched Livestock Master Plan by the Ethiopian governments pays specific attention to quality improvement both in the input and output livestock markets, see Shapiro et al. (2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Universiteit Gent Special Research Fund [grant number BOFDOC2015005401].