Brief history
Matsibolo Dairy Farmers Association’s inception year was 2005, being the founding member of the apex body called Maaparakobo Dairy Farmers Association. It initiated its operations with the capacity of 60 members which drastically decreased to only 15 members. The association is located at the Maseru sub-district

Vision
A well-developed commercial dairy industry with socio-economically inspired stewardship that is steeped with the industry.

Mission
We are striving to motivate and capacitate dairy small holder farmers  to adopt technological innovations that are geared towards improving agricultural productivity in the interest of agro-economic development.

Objectives

  • To minimize production costs.
  • To improve production as well as maximizing profits.
  • To capacitate the association’s dairy farmers with different skills.
  • To improve both biological and artificial insemination.
  • To achieve the diary cows’ health as well as maintaining milk safety all through to the consumer in the food chain.

Current situation
Our farmers have at least four cows each producing an estimation of 60 litres per day. The production costs in the milk industry are rising relatively higher than selling costs, this market costs are determined and controlled by the local processor. The processor pays M4.50 to every litre of milk supplied to it by farmers while they sell M9.50/litre to the consumer. Consequently, this makes life harder both to the consumer as well as the dairy farmer.

Each dairy farmer transports their milk to the processor on their own expense. This shows that the overall net profit returns from every litre is much lower than the M4.50 that processor buys with.

The feeding costs have tremendously increased in the past season (e.g. Lucerne prices have increased to M105/bale, Fodder roll has increased to M750.00, 50kg of Dairy Meal- M260.00, Homing Chop prices differ from M93.00 to M180 and many more). The above problems continue to intensify more because of the current drought prevailing in the country and abroad from the last year.

Most of our feed for livestock is bought from South Africa. Veterinary services are hard to be accessed by local farmers.

Extension services/workers from the government never avail themselves to guide and advice farmers with regard to proper production. Farmers lack proper and necessary problem-solving strategies – that is the manner of raising issues and the suggesting advices lacks transparence.

Achievements
These provocative challenges have forced us to form alliances with other dairy associations in the country. While working corporately with other associations, we realised we stand upon a common vision. Some of our members have managed to buy milk tanks it was not through profits generated from milk production. These prevalent problems in the rearing of dairy cattle have been a motivating force in initiating other enterprises such as poultry, piggery as well as homestead gardening. Furthermore, some of our farmers have bought themselves hummer mills to grind their animal feed.

Future
There is a great need of an establishment of a well-structured body that will be controlled by both farmers and consumers. This body should have a proper mandate, well outlined policies, as well as extension services that will help grow the Milk Industry in Lesotho. This is to say LNDB should be destroyed and be done away with. The Government of Lesotho should also have a high input in the synchronised marketing value chain structures, e.g. handling and processing Plants that will help unit all the associations.