A Taste of Back Home

Well it's been my first week here and already I've had a few things that remind me of back home that I thought I would share.  

The way the program's schedule is set up is I teach on Mondays and Fridays for about 5-6 hours a day, we have field trips on Tuesdays, the students have a Russian language course on Wednesdays, and Thursday is supposed to be for sport, which means they open up the gym and we get to play basketball, indoor soccer, etc...  (the two sports I'm absolutely horrible at).  

Well this past Tuesday, we visited a farm.  Not just any farm, a dairy farm.  And not just any dairy farm, the top producing dairy farm in Russia.  And not just....  ok, you get it.  It's a really unique farm over here and the reason is, it's owned by a British investor that hired an American farm manager to run it.  The farm manager's name is Lorin and he and his family are from Michigan.  He said he's been over here for about 8 years and just took the opportunity after seeing it on a list-serv and winning over in the interview.  I believe he has at least two children, but we only met one, his 8 year old son.  

He had a lot of interesting things to say.  I believe he said they had nearly 2,000 cows on the farm and that he has to do a lot of things differently here than in the U.S.  He has 38 hired employees on the farm.  Three or four were full time veterinarians and 8 were full time security guards.  He said that it's easy for someone to become a veterinarian here but that, at least in his cases for eight years, that the students came out of school without knowing anything.  He's had to show them how to use an ultrasound machine, give medicine, etc...  I saw a couple of the veterinarians and they were both female and looked to be no older than 22-24.  They live on the farm in apartments that he built for them and a few other permanent workers.  He's made an effort to hire on the students and give them as much on the job training as possible.  I'm not sure where his veterinarians graduated from, but it wasn't Moscow State Agroengineering University (MSAU, where I'm teaching).  

The farm is about a five hour bus ride from Moscow, which is slightly misleading because of the traffic that you often encounter here (one of the busiest cities in the world).  I believe it was only about 90 miles (150 km) from MSAU, here in Moscow.  The security was interesting because you don't see too many farms with full time security, let alone 8 security guards.  He said he has a big problem with theft.  He's had equipment and animals stolen from his farm.  In addition to the guards he has more than 30 cameras in operation for a security system.  While the guards are searching for things to do, they take advantage of a destructive species pretty similar to ones back home.  They shoot Wild Boar.  Unlike our situation, they are native here in Russia, but like our situation they are very detrimental to crops.  Lorin said he eats pork at least once a day.  If I ever get the opportunity to come back for fun, I've got a place to hunt Russian boar.  

His farm puts out the most milk production in Russia.  One of our American students that is familiar with dairy farms asked why he uses Holstein cows (the Chickfila dairy cows that have nothing to do with hamburgers or beef...an Ag teacher's pet peeve...) as opposed to Jersey cows that have a higher fat content (thus better milk) and we discovered something interesting.  Pepsi Cola is one of the top two distributors of milk here in Russia (Coca Cola is not the other...) and they don't care what the quality of milk is.  They only want quantity.  Lorin said that his milk is still a much higher quality than what they care for but that he isn't compensated for that increase in quality at all.  Feed prices here are much higher than back in the states because of such a short growing season.  Feed prices are higher, he has to teach his vets, hire security, and isn't compensated for the quality of his product, yet he strives to be one of the best and the American, French and Russian students in our program were highly impressed both with his farm and his style of management.  

I realize that I may have painted somewhat of a negative picture in regards to education and crime, but it seems that like in the U.S., agriculture is on the upswing again in regards to people wanting to make a career of it.  

Remember the student's having to interview a person that they deem to be a leader for one of their assignments?  One of the Russian students, Anatoly, pulled Lorin off to the side and interviewed him.  I didn't know about it until after we were back on the bus and Anatoly came to sit with me so that he could play the recording of the interview from his phone.  He did a great job!  Anatoly then stated that it was fun and that he could see himself being a journalist for agriculture.  Good stuff going on over here.  

And one last point of interest about being a dairy farmer here in Russia that pretty much all of the students asked about and I've had a few people ask me about in regards to my pictures from last year:  It's ok for cows to be cold.  The cold is never the issue.  Lorin said his very first year here it got down to -45 to -48 and while he was miserable working in the cold, there were actually less issues with the cows.  The problem is that when it's that cold, all of the cow's waste literally freezes when it hits the ground, which causes a huge problem when everything begins to thaw out.  They have a machine that turns the cow waste and separates/dries a mulch that they can then add back to the bedding of the calves and cows.  But, when it's frozen, they can't run that machine because it's like a solid block of ice bouncing around in a cement mixer.  So...  the cows are fine.  They produce about 28 liters each, per day (a little over 7 gallons).  

The other taste of home?  We ate at McDonalds on the way back home.  Considering that I had a limited amount of money on me and I hadn't eaten in 10 hours or so, I went with the traditional big mac as opposed to the sandwich specific to Russia.  Last time I had a big mac?  I was probably 13...  I'm not a fan of McDonalds, but it did the job.  

Enjoy the pictures of the dairy.  Plenty of more stuff to write about in blogs to come.