China’s Ningbo Dairy Group looks to greener Australian pastures

One of China’s biggest dairy companies is planning to expand its milk sales to include a range of Australian-grown produce.

Harry Wang, right, with Ningbo president Yin Chong Zhang. Picture: Aaron Francis.

One of China’s biggest dairy companies is planning to expand its sales and daily home delivery of milk to more than one million Chinese households to include a range of fresh Australian-grown produce.

Harry Wang, vice-president of the Ningbo Dairy Group, said yesterday that most Australian food companies and farmers had little idea of the extraordinary interest and exponential demand for Australian food in China in the past three years.

Mr Wang, whose company has bought three dairy farms in south Gippsland in Victoria and plans to build a $20 million fresh milk export bottling plant, wants to hear from Australian agricultural companies looking for distribution and customer partnerships.

“Everyone wants to buy Australian products; there shouldn’t be an Australian food exporter to China not doing well unless they haven’t secured the right partners,” Mr Wang told The Weekend Australian.

“Australian food has such a reputation; we are already delivering our own milk and yoghurt to one million customers and supermarkets (in Zhejiang province) every day; now we think we could distribute other fresh Australian food the same way straight to the door — it could be beef, fruit, vegetables or other healthy things like nuts.”

Ningbo Dairy Group, based in Zhejiang province south of Shanghai, operates 30 dairy farms in China milking daily more than 12,000 cows, which live inside large barns. Consumers subscribe to receive small 200 millilitre glass bottles or cartons of fresh Ningbo milk, all milked and bottled less than 12 hours earlier, rather like buying a subscription cable TV and movie service. More than 1000 company delivery vans drop off the fresh premium quality milk direct to the homes in both the seven million population city of Ningbo and surrounding areas, in the morning and afternoon.

Mr Wang said consumers drink the small containers of fresh Chinese-produced milk for its health attributes, rather like a vital health tonic, before going to work, and often in the evening too. The minimum once-daily Ningbo Dairy milk delivery of a 200ml bottle costs Chinese consumers about $15 a month.

But once Ningbo has built and is operating its new milk bottling plant on its Kernot cluster of farms in southeast Victoria — it is still awaiting final council approval after complaints from neighbours — Mr Wang expects to be able to charge his more affluent customers who want the Australian milk a much higher price.

Ningbo hopes to be able to start exporting fresh milk from its Gippsland farms later this year, as long as its proposed milk bottling plant is approved by the Bass Coast council next month.

“It’s strange in some ways because really milk is milk, and we will be producing it the same way in Australia as we do on our Chinese farms with all the same levels of cleanliness, hygiene and animal welfare standards,” Mr Wang said.

In China, the Ningbo Dairy Group has as its showpiece the biggest farm in east China, the 600ha “18th dairy farm”, created by draining and reclaiming sea marsh land to build one of the most modern dairy farms in China. There, more than 5000 cows — some imported from Australia — are housed in large barns, milked three times a day by some of the company’s 20,000 staff, and fed on alfalfa hay imported from the US or oaten hay and vetch from Australia to give the highest-quality milk.

Feed is also supplemented by grass from the coastal paddocks around the barns, now capable of growing good feed after three years of spreading all the manure from the barns on the paddocks to create an almost-organic growing system.

It is the same closed-loop system Mr Wang wants to introduce on his Gippsland farms — he currently is buying two more — but is keen to banish community misperceptions that keeping his 2000 dairy cows in large barns is the same as building a feedlot.

He says they are very different, with the barns open to the air and the cows able to move around and graze grass if gates are opened.

The main reason for switching from the traditional Australian grazing systems to barn-housed cows is that if the dairy cows don’t have to walk several kilometres twice a day to be milked, and use less energy keeping warm, their milk production becomes all-year round and increases from an average 6000 litres a cow each year to more than 11,000 litres each.

“We want to buy more farms, milk more cows, and really expand our Australian dairy business,” Mr Wang said.

“But we need our neighbours to understand that this is not a feedlot, and that everything we plan to do will be to the highest environmental and health standards.”