ASSOCIATED VOLUNTEER experts

  1st AVe Mission for the Laiterie du Berger - Richard Toll in Senegal

In early 2018, two AVe experts, Louis Jestin and Daniel Mathiot carried out a first mission for the “Shepherd's Dairy”, a Senegalese family business, created in 2006 in Richard Toll in Senegal by Bagore Bathilly, a young Senegalese veterinarian.

	Milking is done by hand, twice a day, in the presence of the calf		Bagore Bathilly director of the Laiterie du Berger - Daniel and Louis AVe Experts

The Laiterie du Berger

The dairy collects fresh milk from breeders in the Richard Toll region (northern Senegal), to offer Senegalese consumers dairy products known under the Dolima brand.
The Laiterie du Berger is not a business like the others, because it is engaged in social business, at three levels :
With respect to the milk deliverers: nearly 800 Peuhl breeders practicing the agro-pastoral system with whom it contributes to creating a real long-term dairy chain
With respect to the consumers by providing healthy and accessible food,
And with respect to the 280 employees of the dairy, by offering specific social conditions (all employees have access to health insurance).
In ten years of existence, several challenges have been met : to operate a dairy from scratch, to create a brand (Dolima), to professionalize marketing and sales.
AVe's mission
The mission is part of the dairy's current strategy, which is to increase its activity (doubling the volumes sold by 2022) based on the development of milk collection. The objective of the mission was threefold : to carry out a diagnosis of the dairy basin of the dairy, to propose a characterization of producers and to present recommendations for developing milk production.

We discovered a world unknown to us : the Peuhls, cattle and small ruminant breeders, who live in very harsh and very rudimentary conditions and who do not hesitate to make transhumance to the South over long distances (350 to 400 km) and over long periods (sometimes almost 6 months) to feed their flock. We visited 35 peuhl farms. We were very well received. At each visit the same questionnaire is filled out.

Each of us had a car and a driver-translator. We had the impression of doing the "Paris / Dakar", because as we were in the dry season, we crossed a sandy area, accessible only by track. We correctly fulfilled our contract : diagnosis, characterization, recommendations.

The results

At the end of the mission, we met Bagore twice to present our conclusions and our action plan proposals. Exchanges continued after the mission with two meetings, one on May 25 before a working group set up by the dairy and another on June 25 before the board of directors of the dairy. Great satisfaction : our work has been well recognized, because it is the action plan proposed by AVe which was chosen to increase milk collection in the Richard Toll area.