In
mid-July, I found myself speaking to a 73-year-old herder in the county of
Bornuur, about 100 km outside of Mongolia’s capital city, Ulaanbaatar. He represented a typical household in my
survey sample, though slightly older. The
herder owned just over 200 head of livestock (comprised mainly of sheep and
goats) and moved his yurt home (“ger”) multiple times throughout the year
within the same township in search of better grassland for his herd. He had previously lived nearly 1,000 km from
Ulaanbaatar in Zavkhan Province, but moved close to the city due to the
negative effects of harsh weather (“dzuds”) and to pursue more economic
opportunity. Near the end of our survey
interview, I asked him what he knew about intensive livestock production
strategies. He answered with a tinge of
excitement in his voice that if I was interested in what most Mongolians called
“farming”, then I should go see the “number one farmer” nearby.
 |
Semi-nomadic
herding households close to Ulaanbaatar are often found close to the road with
their mixed herds. [Photo Credit: Peter Bittner]
|
Afterwards,
I stopped at the nearby farm to see if anyone was home so that I could
interview them. Though the majority of
livestock households near the city were traditional herders, I knew that some
more intensive livestock production households were popping up and I was eager
to speak with an owner of one. The
reason I was studying peri-urban pastoralism in Mongolia was due to the
dramatic increase in livestock densities near the city, where overgrazing runs
rampant. In fact, some local officials I
spoke to said that recent surveys have found that the area is overgrazed
between 3-5 times the capacity of the grassland. Whatever I would see on this farm, I thought
to myself, would be a version of livestock production that was bound to increase
in the next five years.
After
speaking with the family in their spacious brick house, I quickly realized that
this was not your typical Mongolian family.
The couple had been running the farm for six years after their city-dwelling
children made the investments to start the farm. Like the old man, they were originally from
Zavkhan province where they were full-time pastoralists, but then the couple
moved to Ulaanbaatar to be teachers.
After they retired, they moved to the farm and had been living there and
running the operations for six years.
 |
The family’s brick
home was only one of the many differences between settled farming and itinerant
herding.
[Photo Credit: Chimgee
Nergui]
|
The
family owned 50 purebred Montbéliarde cattle.
They had been experimenting with multiple high-producing dairy breeds,
but settled on this French breed since it originated in an area of France that
had similar climate and geography to Mongolia.
They initially started their operation with Mongolian breeds, but
changed the make-up of their herd in order to increase milk production with
breeds that do better living in shelters rather than on the steppe.
Though
the family uses the natural rangeland to feed their cattle in the summer, they
produce their own corn and barley which is fed to the animals throughout the
year. The farm also produces alfalfa for
both hay and silage – a practice that they learned to do through books and the
internet. Their Valley-brand center pivot
sprinkler irrigation system could be spotted just outside of the window, and
they said that they were experimenting with hydroponic barley production in
their greenhouses. The farm also has a
twelve-stall barn with an automatic milking and feeding system – an extremely
rare find in a country where almost all milk production is done by hand.
 |
The barn, ready for the evening milking in the coming
hours.
|
Perhaps
most astonishing was the family’s innovative use of manure. Explained as a “two-year experiment” so far,
the farm was using manure to produce biogas to heat the barn. Unfortunately, the animals became slightly
ill due to gas poisoning this last winter so they had to stop, but one of their
main goals in the next five years is to perfect the system. Any leftover manure from biogas production
was then used as fertilizer for the crops.
I
left the 90-minute interview feeling stunned.
This farming system couldn’t have been any more different than the
semi-nomadic and largely subsistence herding households I had been speaking to
over the previous week. It led me to
wonder if this is the future for livestock production in Mongolia, or whether traditional
pastoralism would continue to be a mainstay of the country’s agricultural
sector. Many of the households I spoke
to were concerned that they traditional way of life in Mongolia would disappear
and that intensive farmers would take over the industry, especially if
grassland degradation continues to intensify.
There is no easy answer to variety of issues that loom in livestock
sector, or to the threat that harsh weather and a troubled Mongolian economy
pose to a way of life that is reminiscent of the time of Chinggis Khan. But perhaps offering opportunities to explore
alternative and diverse ways of production could help many families transition to
a better future.
Comments
Post a Comment