Profile


Snorri Sigurdsson participates in the work of many interna- tional organisations within his field of expertise and is on the International Dairy Federation (IDF) standing committee on farm management. Between 2017 and 2021, Sigurdsson was the leader of CDMTCC, a joint venture between the dairy companies Arla Foods and Mengniu in China. Today he leads a project for Arla Foods in Nigeria, where the dairy cooperative is building up local production of milk in cooperation with the local authorities.


Few people talk about


Chinese dairy production even though it is very advanced.


is either locally bought or imported like soya, dry alfalfa, etc. The major trend in milking is the big rotaries; 80-place rotaries are probably the most common at the bigger farms but the normal fast-exit milking parlour is also quite common at the farms with about 2,000 cows or fewer. Automatic milking systems (AMS) are not commonly used in China; however, there are some farms with AMS but we have not yet seen it take off like in many other coun- tries. The reason for this is probably related to the access that the dairy farms in China have to employees and to people who are willing to work on farms. This has also led to less auto mation being implemented on-farm and this is even the case with newly built dairy farms. Manure scrapers, feed pushers, sweepers, etc.; these roles are not usually automated but performed by farmemployees.


Does the Chinese culture in some way affect how dairy farms are being run? Are there notable comparisons to western dairy farming? A few years back in China we had many small farms that often had one cowshed together with many others in a cooperative. Today those farms are usually owned by one family that has basically bought out the other farmers. The design of those farms is quite similar to the loose housing dairy farm design we see in other countries, with obvious differences depending on where in China the farm is. It is good to remember that China is a similar size to Western Europe, so the conditions for operating a dairy farm are quite different. For example, the conditions at Finnish dairy farms in the north are quite different from those in the Greek dairy farms in the south.


You have said that Chinese dairy farming is barely “on the map” – can you elaborate? What I mean by this is that when you read about dairy production in the world, few people write or talk about Chinese dairy produc- tion, even though it is actually very advanced and has developed very fast as I have mentioned. The reason for this is probably sim- ply because not many know about this situation, understandably, as this development in China has mainly happened over the last ten years or so.


▶ DAIRY GLOBAL | Volume 8, No. 2, 2021 7


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44