Hii
Friends,
As I have committed to you all to
publish the story of Mr. Santosh , who has left his cozy job in the corporate
HQ, forego handsome salary& venturing out in to Dairy farming, so here I am
fulfilling my commitment . Meet Mr.
Santosh D Singh who is now a successful entrepreneur & founder of Amrutha Dairy farm. I was in utter
surprise when I discovered this technical geek’s interest in Dairy farming
which was quite unusual but after talking to Santosh,I discovered his passion
& enthusiasm regarding dairy. If you will ever get a chance to come to
Bangalore please visit his farm, don’t miss it because it’s just refreshing. You
will definitely think about the great George Orwell& his famous book“Animal farm” which all of us might have
read in School.
Early life:
After
his B.E, like millions of students he started cherishing his dream in IT. He
has spent almost a decade with IT giants like Dell, American Online in various
positions. Probably it’s the global
exposure that has hammered the concept of own venture in his mind. However the
lush green farm lands of Europe & US has added fuel to the fire to do
something which will be quite close to mother nature.
Why Dairy Farming:
Santosh’s
deep affection towards animals, birds & nature is quite evident from his
farm presence. Despite being the owner of farm he loves to carry out many of
the activities like cleaning the animals, feeding sometimes milking on his own.
More over there is a growing demand for quality milk & related products.
The margins associated with the milk products is quite lucrative, so it’s quite
natural. I saw a great deal of opportunity in this sector, but as I didn’t have
any expertise in the segment, I enrolled for full term training at National
Dairy Research Institute (NDRI). As part of my education, I stayed over in
functioning dairy farms to get a first-hand feel of staying next to livestock
and tending to them. These stays at farms and the training gave me the
confidence that rearing cows was something I would love to do long term and is
indeed a lucrative vocation.
The Journey has
started:
The
toughest challenge that I faced was to convince my family. Once I convinced
them half of my battle is over as they are provide a lot of confidence &
mental support. My expertise in project management, process improvement,
business intelligence, analytics, and resource management that i had accumulated
over the years helped me a lot to set up the farm.
Initially
I purchased 3 Acres of land & 3 Cows at Dodaballapur just 50 Km away from Bengaluru.
This was being done with an intention of using this as weekend get way for City
dwellers. But later when I decided to venture in to full fledge dairy farming,
I decided to scale it up. Initially I had created a set up for 20 cows. The
basic idea behind adding the cow head count is to increase the milk
productivity & reaching a scale of around 1000- 15000Lts daily. To achieve
this height 20 cows were not sufficient
Technical Support:
One of my NDRI instructors has suggested me to
take the technical help from NABARD. They have Dairy venture capital fund &
Dairy Entrepreneurship development scheme under which I got both financial
& technical assistance and approached State Bank of Mysore to fund my
project. With their advice I realized that in order to fully utilize the
capacity I need to scale it up to 100 cows which was quite promising. However I
scaled up my herd size to 85 cows and produced 750lts of milk per day.
Key Challenges:
One of the major challenges that
I faced during my initial days was the availability of green grass, which is
the most important fodder for the cows. Due to natural calamity I had to face
the hiccup in the supply side. It has increased the cost of feeding to many folds
which affected my bottom line.
But
as “Necessity is the mother of invention” I have found out hydroponics which enables growing of 1 ton of
green fodder / day in a controlled environment at significantly low cost in
comparison to commercially procured green fodder. The 18 months period that I spent with increase
cost of capital is a great lesson for me. It helped me to strengthen my
determination further &quest to find the solution against all types of
odds.
Future Ideas:
I
am supporting a Dutch group of Dairy Business Professionals to setup a Cheese
Production House in Bangalore, I am using my 5-6 years of business contacts
built around Dairy to support this new business initiative. I plan to conduct workshops in every major
city of our country to help more and more dairy enthusiasts to understand the
current dairy business scenario in a better way and this ensures success of all
new dairy ventures as the expectations are well set before the business is started. I believe in sharing the
rich experience that was learned the hard way with lot of capital that was
invested in my business and some of the mistakes that we made through our
journey should not be repeated by wannabe dairy farmers. I have been providing consulting support too
and this is more like hand holding new dairy farm owners to get their act
right.
Sources of
Motivation: The fact that I don’t have to
wade through heavy traffic and pollution every day and being at farm gives me
more lively experience and this keeps me on and on. Well, there are other major factors that
motivate me, I have had the privilege of meeting many great individuals in the
last few years and most of these individuals came all the way to my farm and these individuals came from every corner of our country and not
just them but also our people who have been working in different countries came
all the way to my farm and to meet me and take support in understanding every aspect of dairy business
and in setting up new dairy business. I
have provided lot of support to them and now through dairy workshops that I
conduct I am helping more and more individuals to get the dairy logic
right. I have started giving back to the
system in a very healthy way and this means a lot to me.
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