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EkoNiva has opened a stock-breeding complex in Siberia
By Svetlana WEBER
Friends and partners of EkoNiva, as well as agricultural producers of the Novosibirsk, Tomsk and Kemerovo regions, gathered at OOO Sibirskaya Niva for the opening. Despite the frost, the guests gladly inspected the new complex and participated in a presentation of agricultural equipment organized by OOO EkoNiva-Sibir. A complex like this is new for the Novosibirsk region. But in the future, other farms in the region plan to assimilate EkoNiva's experience. As the head of the regional Department of Agriculture, Georgy Ivashchenko, said at the opening, another ten farms in the region will be building dairy complexes, and Sibirskaya Niva will become a base for distributing modern dairy farming technology.
Almost all the milk, 10 tonnes a day, is delivered to the plant of the Unimilk Company, the long-time partner of other EkoNiva stock-breeding farms.
According to Stefan Duerr, President of the EkoNiva Company, the stock-breeding complex will reach an acceptable level of profitability in two to three years. Sibirskaya Niva doesn’t only plan to produce milk and meat. The farm is working towards being licensed as a pedigree stock breeder, which means that later it will be able to sell pedigreed Simmental cattle. Opinion Yury Bugakov, Director General of ZAO Plemzavod Irmen: “It is important that such a modern stock-breeding complex has appeared in the Novosibirsk region. I think that they will be able to fine-tune the production technology quickly here and start working effectively.” | ||
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Despite the economic complications of this year, 
So far only one cow barn for 472 head, a calving section for 100 head, a dairy unit, and office space for the employees have been opened. Now there are 300 dairy cows there. When the complex is working at projected capacity, it will house a 1,800-head dairy herd. Simmental heifers were brought last year from Austria and Germany. The past winter was a serious trial for them, but now they have very comfortable and warm housing. The animals are housed using free-stall technology in group and individual boxes on deep litter. For calves there are individual cold-housing hutches. Milking is conducted on a GEA WestfaliaSurge rotary milking system with the capacity to milk 220 cows per hour. Herd management is automated using the DairyPlan management program. 
The overall volume of investments in the dairy project came to 250 million roubles, around 80 percent of which were funds borrowed from Rosselkhozbank under the National Agriculture Industry Development Project. 
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