Having just read Kansas's comment about the readership of blogs, I will try and pick mine up. Will it get read well who knows!
We are just beginning to think about coming out of winter here and it has been near four months of extremely cold weather. For some reason we seem to have been the coldest place in Europe and often colder than Moscow. The latter is a little strange. The cold means more food and that means we are right on the margin. We are just hoping that we can get the stock out early. The local fodder shortage does mean that many stock owners have had animals looking for food outside where they can find it. From the outside it may look like some sort of sustainable, peasant agriculture but I would not want to be a farm animal living in those standards.
The cold has slowed us down with the installation of a cheese-production unit as it is impossible to heat such a space. Worse the two local contractors have let us down badly. We are tending to build it from the UK now as it is more efficient. Specialists come in for a few days work like mad and fly out. It all gets problematic when we have to find them something locally. We have managed to find the odd good local contractor out of this but it is by luck more than anything else. At least the equipment is now in and we started employing the staff. Two more hard months work to get operational. At least by meeting local standards we will have a processing unit that can look down upon the rest of the World! Not sure if the local inpsectors realise that at the end of the day the over-specification costs will have to get passed on and that means more high-priced dairy products in the EU's poorest country. It makes little sense, but that is what happens when you do let the bureaucrats run the country.
Increasing our milk supply is our next problem. The farms should get to about 300 milking buffalo this summer and that is probably as much as we can process and market. We are now starting looking at putting communal milking stations into some villages where the villagers still have a lot of buffalo. They will stop off going to and returning from the communcal pastures. It will be good to keep an old tradition alive but we still have to get another two commercial scale herds in operation. We will be looking to rear all our females for quite a while yet and that will keep us under pressure building housing and expanding the forage and feed production areas. Currently we are at around 500 head and 1,000 hectares. Land should not be a problem but much of what we have is having to be brought back from dereliction and it takes time. My over-riding problem is that we started with old tractors but we have expanded way beyond their capability and that leaves us very short of power. A good worshop team is rebuilding the tractors but at the end of the day they cannot renew a 20 year old tractor.
The resolution to the machiney issue should be the EU grants that should be available to upgrade farms. One hopes they are more successful than the pre-EU entry grants as they did not really reach the farming community. I looked at the county project map yesterday and it is covered in dots for agrotourism guest houses!
For now it is back to managing our workforce of near 60 with a young inexperienced management team. They are making up for a lot with enthusiasm and the policy of introducing local younger staff seems to paying off. Some come from families who have been here for centuries and that seems to be providing the motivation for trying to make things change. I sometimes wonder why I took on the role of Honorary Consul maongst all this but it certainly seems to have its advantages as it appears to open doors and allows me to encourage local government to get moving on some proper rural and agricultural regeneration inititatives. Just roll on summer now so I can at least get out and about with my two year old son. Next summer I expect it will be taking both the boys out with me as it is never too young for them to start learning about what it means to be in agriculture!