Monday & Tuesday

Monday, the 15th of Oct.  After a restful Sunday evening, I returned to my schedule of meetings.  It started out fast with a high level meeting at the Government House.  It was intended to just be a short meeting - 9:30-10:00, but ended up lasting longer.  It was with a Mr. ERKHEMBAYAR  Lombo, the Urban and Rural Development Policy Advisor to the President of Mongolia.  I'll be honest, the meeting started out awkwardly.  We were met at the front door of Government House (the central building housing the parliamentary and executive branches of government here) by a young lady from the protocol office who whisked us, at a very fast pace down many hallways, up stairs, and down for what seemed like a half mile.  Finally we arrived at a massive set of double doors, and were ushered into a large room with very large, very formal chairs down each side of the room against the wall.  At the end of the room, were two more chairs, placed side by side, separated by a small table with a bowl of tiny candies.  I was directed to sit in one, and my translator (Mr. Shagai) sat in the first chair along the wall to my right.  After several minutes a staff person came in, whispered a few words to Mr Shagai and scurried out.  Mr Shagai let me know that he had been asked to translate for the meeting.  Several moments later Mr. ERKHEMBAYAR entered the room.  We shook hands and he sat at the chair to my left, facing the same way I was.  We proceeded to have at first a very formal conversation but it quickly loosened up a little.  It was still most awkward to sit in an over-sized chair with the person I am talking to on my left, facing the same way I am, with the translator sitting on my right.  All in all, it was a good conversation.  I learned a bit more about Mongolian animal husbandry.  For those of you who don't remember, one of the major reasons I came here was to learn how farmers here advocate.  How government interacts with the governed, in this case farmers.  I have gotten the sense in my time here however, and especially from Mr. ERKHEMBAYAR that frankly they don't seem to interact much at all.  There are analysts and researchers and academicians and politicians all talking to each other to figure out what is best for farmers.  There are farmers who are talking to each other about the fact that government should do something . . . but there is little exchange between the two.

From there I went to visit with Ms. TUUL from CHF International here in Mongolia.  CHF works around the world doing development work.  They have a project going on currently in both Rwanda and Mongolia to try and build capacity among dairy farms. I mentioned in a previous blog about how animal agriculture here works, and it holds true for most of the dairy farms in Mongolia as well.  The cows they milk are meat breeds and feed virtually 100% on pasture.  The average cow yields just 2-6 liters of milk a day, and is dry for 4-6 months of the year.  CHF is working to increase the capacity of the dairy farms by assisting with knowledge development in areas around raising feed, artificial insemination, herd improvement, etc.  The only feed that they have been able to raise successfully so far is wheat, the same wheat that most of the crop fields produce for milling into flour.  Attempts to grow corn as a feed have floundered, I suspect because of the incredibly short growing season and a lack of fertilizer used in crop farming here.

Tuesday, October 16th
Tuesday started with meetings at the Agricultural University here in UB.  For a country of 3 million  people, I was impressed with the size - over 10,000 students attend the university, specializing in animal husbandry or crop farming fields.

The crop farming centers primarily around wheat farming.  Some quick facts - whatever variety of wheat you grow here, it must have a growing time of 90 days or less.  It must be a summer grain due to a lack of snow cover and -40 weather in the winter.  It must be able to grow with .5-1.5 inches of rain a month during that growing season.  But they do farm a lot of grain (roughly 1 million acres of it) and achieve yields in the neighborhood of 1250 lbs/acre.  Land is cheap here and plentiful.  I mean really cheap and really plentiful.  All land is leased from the government, on a 30, 40, 60, or 100 year basis at a rate of 70,000 MNT/100 hectares, or about $.21 a year per acre.  Just prior to the fall of communism, there was more than 2 million acres of cropland being farmed.  After the fall, virtually every farm shut down and in the early 90's only a few hundred thousand acres were farmed.  that is slowly coming back, but there is land for wherever wishes to farm it at rock bottom prices.  That being said, there is no ready supply of anything to grow crops.  Everything must be imported from Russia, China, or further.

Cashmere in its cleaned,
but still raw state.

Animal Husbandry is also open for a seemingly limitless expansion.  Mongolians have over 50 million units of livestock in a country of 3 million people.  The breeds they raise are some of the hardiest on the planet.  They eat only grass, drink only what little snow they can find for 5 months of the year, and eat immense quantities of grass all summer.  Quality is now the buzzword.  Breeds are being improved, vaccinations are becoming commonplace, and some farmers are attempting to transition to growing some feed to supplement the nomadic/grazing farming style.  A new breed of cashmere goat that was created at the University produces on average 400 grams of high quality (15 micron) fiber each year, this compared to an average for the country of 100 or so grams of 17-18 micron fiber.

It is then dehaired, and
properly aligned.

We then got visit a cashmere factory. As you may remember, we had visited the Gobi Factory Store earlier in the stay, now it was time to see the factory itself.  Mongolia is the second largest producer of cashmere in the world.  It produces on average 3,000 tons of the raw material each year.  It is the fastest growing part of animal husbandry in the country, and the factory we were about to visit is the largest factory of its kind in Mongolia.  It was first built under communism with Japanese investment, and has since been privatized.  It is 40% Mongolian owned, and 60% Japanese owned.

it is then pulled into yarn

It is laid down in flat continuous sections,
folded from side to side as it goes.

and spun.  there were 8 rows of yarn spinners
just like this one. The equipment was all very
advanced and from Italy.

Row upon row of knitting machines were
then programed to knit a particular piece of a
garmet - a sweater body, a sleave, a blanket,
whatever, each machine knitting away.

Women sitting at various types of very advanced sewing
machines then stitched the pieces together, and sewed on
the labels by hand.

Despite each article being made one at a time,
there were boxes and boxes of each product.

The factory was impressive, and afterwards, we made one more visit to the cashmere store.  I succumbed this time and purchased a sweater.  The quality of the products where amazing, and I can honesty say, if you want high end, amazing quality cashmere, seek out Gobi brand, it is among the finest in the world, and produced in a very good factory with many very happy, workers employing local Mongolians.

We next got to visit a folk and ethnic cultural performance.  It was a show put on for the tourists like many you would seek in most regions of the world with unique cultures of their own.  It was about 1 hour and 15 minutes of some very impressive dance, throat signing, and a contortionist.

I'll leave you with two clips from the night.  Be sure to watch them both.  They are truly amazing.  I can't seem to get them to upload here to blogger, so you'll have to settle for clicking on a link to them on facebook - the contortionist; and the throat singer.