The signing of the Memorandum between Centre of Public Education NGO and the urban municipality of Ustyluh in the Volyn oblast marked the launch of the project “Improving the Competence of the Residents of the Ustyluh Urban Municipality in Dairy Farming to Ensure Adequate Food Security”.
The project is financed by the U-LEAD with Europe Programme and is aimed at supporting farmers who keep or wish to keep cattle and produce milk.
According to the head of the project, Olha Ivankiv, two public pastures with an area of up to 30 hectares will first be arranged in the Zoria starosta district of the municipality and prepared for sowing a mixture of perennial grasses.
“We want to ensure high-quality pastures and teach the farmers modern technologies for cow husbandry and high-quality milk production. To do this, we will combine the practice (purchasing grass mixtures and milk quality analysers) with the theory, namely training for everyone who wishes to keep cows and make a profit from it, promoting farming and dairy cooperatives and creating educational materials that others will then learn from,” she said.
Another outcome will be the development of a local policy, the Regulation on the Creation and Management of Public Pastures in the Municipality. More than 60 residents of the municipality who wish to engage in milk production and cattle breeding have already volunteered to participate in the project.
According to Anatolii Parkhomiuk, Head of the Regional Office of U-LEAD in the Volyn oblast, the project is implemented in close cooperation with the Ustyluh municipality.
“In recent years, the number of livestock has been decreasing every year, and people in the villages were left without adequate support, and sometimes without means to live. In addition to helping preserve and increase the number of livestock, his project, crucially, will teach how to make money off it. We would like to go back to fostering farmers and their interest in keeping livestock and making a profit from it,” he said.
Intermediate results will be presented as early as in August of this year at the Regional Forum “The Role of the Municipality in Ensuring Food Security”, which will be attended by representatives of all 54 municipalities in the Volyn oblast.