Would you like your milk shaken or stirred Mr Bond?

We moved from ZhengZhou which is in the middle of China up to Hohhot, this is the Capital of Inner Mongolia.
Inner Mongolia (apart from sounding like somewhere completely in the middle of nowhere, which it is) is a special administrative zone in China, which I take for meaning it was at the edge of China and difficult to govern- but hey I’m just a dairy farmer, what do I know about communism!!
It was a great relief to get out of the smog and general dirtiness of Zhengzhou and into the fresh air and high skies of this mountainous region.
You may have noticed that this is written in past tense I gave up trying to upload any sort of blog- the internet is a bit difficult in China- facebook is not allowed, what’s that all about? It’s like someone blocking you big style.
We went to Hohhot to look at the burgeoning dairy industry and the sheep industry.
First stop was Yilli Dairy which is one of two very large dairy companies based in this region. Yilli have big ambitions and as they showed us a model of their plans it was clear that they have only just begun, their scale model was huge and the very new factory we were hosted in was only a tiny corner of their plans. These plans included a small city to house their staff. It was sort of like Ice Cream world- you could imaging the CEO of Yilli sitting in his office stroking a fluffy white cat- "Would you like your milk shaken or stirred Mr Bond??"
Seriously, at face value this operation means business and with the government of China a major shareholder in the organisation it has serious clout, and given that they have staff motivational posters which say (this is paraphrased) "Keep your head down and work" they know how to make their staff work hard.
Their operation is designed to produce milk powder, yoghurt and ice cream very efficiently to supply markets in the affluent eastern coastal regions of China.

Dairys imagery

I was very interested and heartened to see that they produce milk from grass, at least looking at ALL their imagery and promotional material around the whole production plant and even on billboards around the country this company screamed "Fresh milk produced by cows in the countryside" Brilliant, a model for he future- large scale dairy production, sustainable, fresh, grass based, this could be a model for the world which will make farmers rich and keep the animal rights campaigners happy…. Hmmm is this too good to be true??
When we visited a dairy farm later that day it was definately not grass the were eating, but in its own way the farm was producing milk with about 300 cows in a very similar way to many in the UK but definately not using grass- only maize silage, hay and concentrates.

More about Chinese Dairies later, anyway when we were up in Inner Mongolia we also saw some sheep, we actually ate quite a few of them as well ……. Please refer any questions to Tony Davies or Arwyn Owen who live in Wales need I say more.(sorry guys)
Best thing in Hohhot- The friendly people showing us around and translating for us, thank you Amanda and Co.
The worst thing in Hohhot- Milk (pronounced Meeook) Tea, which is made with salty milk and has bits of yucky stuff floating in it, the nearest thing to being sick backwards I can imagine.