In wake of restructuring

On 21 January this year, Agrowill Group, the largest agricultural investment and development company in the Baltic states, started restructuring its dairy farms. Teun Sleurink, an expert from the Netherlands managing the project, is convinced that the new operating model will increase the efficiency of dairy farms by up to 40% and will help to achieve higher average milk yields in Lithuania (7 tons of milk per cow per year).

In an effort to retain its position as the most modern agricultural development and investment company in the Baltic states, Agrowill Group has launched the dairy farm restructuring project.  Although average annual milk yields per cow (5.7 t) in dairy farms controlled by the Group are currently higher than the Lithuanian average (4.7 t), Agrowill Group will try to equal the most successful foreign farms with average milk yields of 9–12 t.

Based on the new operating model, two large farms keeping an average of 2,000 dairy cows each are being created in place of current 15 dairy farms with different efficiency. The new dairy farms will be established on the basis of two most efficient dairy farms of agricultural companies Agrowill Smilgiai (Panevėžys district) and Grūduva (Šakiai district). Cows will be kept in a total of five best technically equipped farms, but special software will help to manage all herds as one herd.

According to Teun Sleurink, the leader of the restructuring project, the new method of management of dairy farms will facilitate boosting of operating efficiency by up to 40%. According to Sleurink, this objective is expected to be achieved through more effective organisation of work, maximisation of the use of existing animal production buildings, recruitment of the best qualified specialists and liquidation of part-time units duplicating each other. Equalisation of the animal feed ration will ensure the same high quality of feed and better health of dairy cows. The planned production of large quantities of feed in one place will help reduce production costs. “Advanced animal care, feeding and milking technologies will enable one employee to handle up to 100–120 dairy cows,” the project leader said. According to Sleurink, this is a normal workload in foreign dairy farms but it is twice as high as the present normal workload in Lithuania. “All the abovementioned actions will enable us to increase milk yields and reduce the cost of raw milk. This will facilitate more successful competition in Lithuanian and international markets,” the dairy expert said. 

In Sleurink’s words, the activities of the new dairy farms in Lithuania will be organised using the experience of the most modern US, German and Dutch dairy farms supplying the bulk of raw milk to the global market. Average annual milk yields in these countries’ farms are up to 12 t. Therefore, as soon as the dairy farms of Agrowill Group in Lithuania reach the 7 t average, a further dairy farm development programme will be prepared.
In the course of the restructuring of Agrowill Group companies, milk production activities will be abandoned at seven companies having deeper crop production traditions. The activities of these companies will be focused on the growing of feed and grain crops. Ambitious efficiency improvement objectives have also been set for these farms. A farm performance improvement project will be initiated during preparations for spring season agricultural works. 

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