By Daniel Tyokua
The Federal Captial Territory Administration,FCTA, Agricultural and Rural Development Secretariats,ARDS, has trained pastoralists on the better ways of processing milk.
The pastoralists drawn from the FCT Area Councils were engaged in a series of trainings, where a team of experts exposed them to efficient methods of hygienic milk handling, to help improve the quality and market value of their milk.
At the two-day capacity building workshop for Diary Cooperative Groups in the FCT, Hajiya Umma Abubakar, Director, Department of Animal Husbandry Services at the Secretariat, noted that the livestock subsector holds a lot of unexploited opportunities especially along its production and processing value chain.
“We train pastoralists who own 90% or more of the national herds of cattle and milk production in the country because what we need to do is to enhance the way milk is being produced and handled.
“The department has to ensure that there is a clean hygienic raw material, used to process the milk. And we are going to have series of trainings in terms of production, handling and the processing across the six Area Councils of the FCT” she said.
The workshop was organised by Department of Animal Husbandry Services, under the Agricultural and Rural Development (ARDS) held in the Bwari and Gwagwalada Area Councils.
She promised that the department will strengthen diary cooperative groups, so that they will aggregate milk , and pave way for private processors that are ready to uptake the milk from them.
“We have to train and give them the equipment for quality milk production and handling. It is starting with these groups, because they produce the milk, and we want to improve the quality of the small quantity of the milk they are producing”, she stressed.
Most of the participants who are mainly women involved in primary diary production process described the training programme as timely and key towards improving and harnessing of potential in the livestock subsector.
