In agriculture, every country gets wrapped up in its own bubble about what it's good at and what it can be a world leader in. Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to take part in a global focus program run by Nuffield Australia. The most interesting country of the trip was Kenya.

Our visits included a dairy farm of 264 cows milked by hand by 19 men twice a day. This was done in the field. To combat the challenge of high temperatures, a three way cross breeding program is in place using Jersey, Friesian and the native breed Boran. These cows are producing 2,800 litres.

World overview

A visit to the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, Kenya gave a fantastic world overview. It is headed up by New Zealander Tony Brenton-Rule. He asked our group who the lowest cost milk producer in the world is and sure enough, the kiwi in our ranks answered New Zealand. Wrong replied Brenton-Rule, it's Uganda. I checked it up recently and they're capable of producing milk for under 10c/l.

Brenton-Rule laid out the opportunities ahead for the Kenyan livestock industry, particularly dairy. He said their target was, like Ireland, to expand. The intention was to give Kenyan smallholders the confidence to increase their dairy cow numbers from one cow to two and in the case of some, go as far as having five cows. I'll admit it - we all laughed at this method of doubling production. We shut up fast when he said there's 10m smallholders, which makes the Irish expansion of 300,000 cows seem insignificant.

All roads lead to China

On our travels throughout the country we encountered four different road building projects, all Chinese crews. All roads were leading to the Indian Ocean and on to China. The same China that world agriculture is viewing as a pot of gold. They are leasing land in Kenya and other African countries for their own food security.

Lisavaird co-op's calendar

Lisavaird co-op's calendar this year features archive photos of milk being delivered to the creamery branches by horse, donkey and cart. A nice touch. Looking closer, I saw that most of those photos were taken between 1988 and 1990. It made me think back to March, when seeing churns on donkeys and carts and even on motorbikes. We smirked at the novelty of it and thought how far behind they were. Twenty-four years isn't very long in the greater scheme of things.

Perspective is a very useful tool, far more valuable than hindsight. Let's use it wisely.