Improving Milk Supply in Northern Ukraine

Abstract

Cow milk constitutes 98 percent of all milk produced in Ukraine with the remaining 2 percent of milk coming from goats and sheep. Milk production has experienced a decline since the country’s independence in 1991 and this agricultural sub-sector is one of the few where this trend has not abated. In spite of this, Ukraine remains an overall net exporter of dairy products. During the early transition period of 1990-2000, rural households1 increasingly resorted to subsistence farming and food self-sufficiency and added to the number of cows they held. In 2000, however, the number of cows per rural household started to decrease. In 2009, milk production of commercial farms increased for the first time since the 1990s, but continued to decline at household farms. Despite this shift in milk production trends by different farm types, rural households still account for about 80 percent of all milk produced. As opposed to dairy cattle inventories, the productivity of dairy c ows in Ukraine has been increasing since the mid-1990s, reflecting the sector’s improvements in feed conversion and more rational use of farm resources as compared with Soviet times. In 2002-2003, milk yields exceeded levels achieved in the late 1980s during the time of Soviet Ukraine. Average cow milk productivity increased by an impressive 48 percent (nearly 10 percent per year) from 2000 to 2005. Commercial dairy farms increased productivity by 86 percent (17 percent per year) and r ural household farms by 23 percent (5 percent per year) during the same period. In 2010, average milk yield per cow for all types of farms was about 4 000 kg/year in Ukraine, or slightly above milk yields in the Russian Federation (3 800 kg) but below these in Poland (4 800 kg), Belarus (4 600 kg) and Western Europe (6 700 kg) according to FAOSTAT data in 2010. However, taking into consideration the favourable climate and availability of both arable land and pastures in Ukraine, there is still significant room for cow productivity growth in Ukraine.