Bocaina farm - Brazil

The Farm:

• Located in Passos city, south of Minas Gerais state, Brazil.
• Owner:  Cleber de Oliveira
• No. of dairy cows: 35
• Breed: Holstein cross-bred
• Milking system: DeLaval bucket milking system
• 2 milkings per day

Farm Management:

Cleber was born in the area he now farms and loves the farming lifestyle along with his local countryside. The farm he manages today, together with his two brothers, belongs to his father who is also a milk producer. A third brother works in the city and delivers what is needed from the city on a weekly basis and takes care of the operation’s administrative duties. 31-year old Cleber and his wife have two children aged 13 and 10 who also help on the farm.

Up to 2003, Cleber’s wife took care of the hygiene side of the milking routine and his son helped milk after school. Now they hired an employee who takes care of milking, feeding and hygiene.

“Milking is a tradition in my family and it’s one which supports us. My father and brother are also milk producers”, says Cleber.

Cleber considers himself “privileged” to live 10 kilometres from the biggest local city – which gives him access to good schools, hospitals and other necessary things – while remaining on rural land.

Milking:

“Milk production is profitable for me and averages 14,000 litres per month. I get around 15 per cent net profit from my operation”, says Cleber matter-of-factly.

The herd is fed a small portion of concentrate and silage in the milking room, before a simple milking procedure begins. This routine includes using chlorine to disinfect the cows and then bucket milking them, before they are released back on to pasture. Cleber delivers the milk in buckets to his father’s farm which is “two minutes from the milking room” and it is stored in a cooling tank there. A co-op milk truck collects the milk daily and Cleber says the co-op’s milk payment is “highly focused” on milk quality. “They take samples based on a global bacterial count rather than a SCC. Legislation allows up to 500,000 on this count.”

Herd management:

The family operates the business themselves without using consultants, but one person comes on the farm every six months “for specific vaccinations”.
Reproduction involves 50 per cent AI and 50 per cent bulls. Calves are born on pasture and left with their mothers for the first four months. Cleber says he is “a little more careful” with AI calves and will usually accompany them during milking. “I keep the calves with their mothers for the first four months because sometimes there is a little infection on the mother’s teats and the calf helps fix this with its suckling motion. Then I take the calves away and the mother continues producing her milk,” he says. Bull calves are sold when they are 10 months old and the cows are usually sold after five lactations.

Cleber says using a crossbred herd means less production costs with better longevity because they are sturdy and resistant to infections. “We have very good health control because we use these cross-bred cows instead of pure-breds.” However last year Cleber lost two cows to a tropical disease carried by bats and says this is “one of those things” in Brazil.

Ticks are controlled with spraying once a month “or sometimes twice in the winter”. Cleber notes that if the tick population increases in the herd, he will sometimes use veterinary shots too. Mastitis control involves visual assessment and antibiotics are administered if milk quality decreases according to the co-op’s  analysis. All the milk is filtered before it enters the cooling tank and Cleber has had no cases of mastitis over the past months.
Feeding:
Cows are fed 100 per cent silage, but stay out in the pasture.

The future

Cleber is a strong believer in education and wants his children to put education before anything else in life, until they are old enough to make their own career decisions. Cleber was not formally educated himself but says he has all he could “ever want” in his current lifestyle.

“Milk production is doing better than other types of farming in the area like coffee or corn and I know there is a strong future in doing what I do. Milk production will always be needed because milk is necessary for life, so I think I have a good perspective of my work.”

“In some other countries there is government subsidies but we don’t have that in Brazil. It’s tough here but we need to follow the trends to stay up to date with everything, so we must pay out a lot.  Unfortunately I can’t get all the capital I need for future investment from my milk production and interest rates are too high to borrow from the bank, so it’s difficult to move as far ahead as I would like to.”