Agriculture Publication Date 11-10-2020

Kozhevnikov Vladimir Nikolaevich

Executive Director of the CLE "Milk Union of Kazakhstan".

The level of development of dairy processing in Kazakhstan is currently quite good, especially at our large factories, such as Food Master, Emil, N'tizhe. These companies operate using the most modern technologies, using the most modern equipment. Of course, all this equipment is still imported, mainly American, Israeli, and Swiss. Neither Kazakhstan nor Russia produces such equipment for processing dairy products.

In order to assess the level of development of our dairy processing, it is enough to go to any store in Kazakhstan, where it is impossible to distinguish our and imported products by packaging, packaging. And the recipes and technologies are classic, standard, but each has its own development. There are various standards, state, European standards and standards of the organization itself.

The main problem in our area is the lack of quality raw milk. This problem is heard, everyone knows it. Our herd structure is arranged in such a way that more than 70% of milk falls on producers from subsidiary farms.

We can say that we went into subsistence farming, although 25 years ago everything was mainly produced on dairy farms, where everything was regulated and the quality of raw materials was well monitored. A cow always gives good milk wherever she is, but the storage and transportation system is another matter.

Milk that is collected from every small producer eventually loses quality. Because every grandmother comes with her own bucket (washed or not washed, we don't know), strained or not strained milk (we also don't know), and in the process of collection and transportation, quality is lost.

In factories, naturally, you have to work a lot with this milk in order to bring it to certain standards that determine the quality of milk. Of course, such milk is not expensive to buy.

However, in the process of processing, milk becomes more expensive, because it is necessary to do complex cleaning through separators, apply deeper and tougher methods of pasteurization at a temperature of 95-97 degrees.

All this is done to achieve guaranteed safety performance of the product. Of course, many people know about this problem, and various programs are already being introduced to solve it.

At the moment we have lost the good training of specialists in the processing of raw materials. We now have only the Shakarim University in Semipalatinsk, which trains specialists in dairy processing, and the Almaty Technological University.

Until recently, we had an excellent base of secondary specialized education, excellent technical schools worked in Pavlodar, in VKO in Shemonaikha. Unfortunately, few specialists are trained in Kazakhstan.

Of course, there are people who leave to study in Omsk, but this applies mainly to milk production technologists.

Now we have a huge shortage of engineering and technical personnel, primarily electronics kov, because all the equipment is rather complicated, especially imported, so good electronics engineers, IT specialists, fitters, electronics mechanics, technologists and so on are needed.

We have an example of the Vostok Milk enterprise, which has entered into agreements with educational institutions.

The company sends its young personnel for training, pays for this training, then young specialists undergo practical training at the enterprise. This practice can only be afforded by large enterprises, and even then not all, because it is expensive.

Therefore, I believe that you need a high-quality basic education, and only then improve your qualifications in additional courses.

For example, our organization annually conducts courses on safety, sanitary control, and so on. We have poor training of basic specialists. Many of our enterprises now use modern methods of work.

For example, the Collect Mobile25 system is a vehicle tracking system , monitoring pastures, although this is not entirely related to processing plants, but we also work with communal farms, we are trying to ensure that they introduce this system and tracked and the movement of livestock, and how pastures are kept, and what ration the animals have. There are also robotic farms, where four human operators serve over 400 head of cattle, everything is fully automated there. Colleagues from Belarus came to visit us, we went to Croatia to look, and I can tell you that our products and production are not a bit worse, and somewhere even better.

For "white" products - this is milk, sour cream, we can quite cope with ensuring food safety, but in deep processing we are still lagging behind again because of the quality of raw materials, we are import-dependent on cheese, butter, from milk powder.

This is what we have lost in 20 years, having once gone into subsistence farming, and now it is necessary to restore it again.