Today is my first day in the heart of dairy country. Close to 80% of the milk produced in Chile comes from this region around the towns of Osorno and Puerto Montt. The climate is very similar to New Zealand and dairies here are pasture based and seasonal calving, 60% in spring and 40% in the fall. At 220 pesos per liter, the equivalent of 38 cents Canadian, the milk price here is 10 cents lower than near Santiago, and land is also cheaper at roughly $7,000 Canadian per acre.

Our first stop of the day was the INIA Research station which has just started an ambitious project to compare parlor and robotic milking in pasture based dairying. The original dairy herd at INIA now milks 220 cows in a 2 x 20 midline milking parlor. 100 cows have been reassigned to the new robotic milking dairy, which has 2 DeLaval VMS300 robots, and 2 computer feeding stations in a milking center set up with three selection gates that direct cows to three different pasture areas depending on the time of day. In this “three way grazing system”, going to a new pasture after milking is one of the incentives for visiting the robots. Cows are directed to new pasture at 6 p.m., 2 a.m. and 10 a.m. and any stragglers that don’t come on their own are brought up from the old pasture about 12 hours later.  This research station is also doing work on annual forage crops, heat stress and a variety of other topics.

We also visited a herd of 766 cows milked in a 50 stall rotary that was running for 3 months. Milking now takes 3.5 hours twice per day versus 6 hours in their previous parlor. As a result of increased grazing time and less stress, production increased from 20 to 24 liters per cow. It is summer in Chile and all cows were on pasture now, but this herd did have barn space to house and feed each half of the herd from stored feed between milkings once a day in winter.

Our third and last stop was a visit to the Manuka Dairy Group. Manuka was started in 2009 by 5 New Zealand dairy farming families. Their goal is to become a major milk supplier in South America, using New Zealand management techniques. The company now has more than 25,000 acres of improved grassland, and operates 49 nearly identical farms, each with about 500 acres of grass and 700 small framed coloured crossbred cows, producing about 4,200 litres per cow. Each farm has a milking center with a 2 x 20 swing parlor and a small house for the herdsman. Total permanent staff per farm is a team of three with additional help available for breeding and calving.  The company has its own training facilities for new hires, and lots of protocols, performance measures etc. They have plans to grow to 70 farms by 2025. While each farm unit is a fairly simple enterprise, the possibilities offered by such a large group of dairies under common ownership is mind boggling to say the least.

As is my custom in any foreign country I also made a stop in a grocery store today, and was very surprised by what I found there. I headed to the back of the store expecting to find the refrigerated dairy section strategically placed to encourage impulse buying along the way. It was not there, and it was not anywhere in the store! Grocery stores in Chile do not sell fresh milk. All the milk sold here is UHT processed and sold in 1 litre tetras, transported, stored and displayed without refrigeration for the equivalent of $1.55 Canadian per litre.  They do carry some yogurt and a very limited variety of pre sliced cheeses, but variety is very limited.

Rotational grazing New Zealand style at a Manuka dairy in southern Chile

All in all this was a very interesting day again. It is becoming clear that there is much to see here for a PDO tour.