Karnataka’s fully automated dairy – Mysuru Mega Dairy – was inaugurated here on Friday. The state-of-the-art dairy has come up at Alanahalli here with a capacity to process nine lakh litres of milk daily.
Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy, who was on a whirlwind tour of Mysuru district launching various development works and events, inaugurated the new dairy.
Mysuru Mega Dairy is a venture of Mysuru District Cooperative Milk Producers’ Societies’ Union Ltd. The mega dairy had become essential owing to the rise in milk production as the existing dairy at Siddharthanagar lacked space for the addition of new facilities such as deep freezers. The new dairy is expected to save operational costs for the management.
It will initially process six lakh litres of milk daily. It is built to the capacity of processing up to nine lakh litres. The new facility was also aimed to encourage dairy farming and rope in more farmers into dairy vocation for improving their income.
The mega dairy has come up on a 13-acre plot closer to the existing one. The mega dairy was conceptualised five years ago and built at a cost of ₹128 crore.
A sum of ₹41.66 crore had been contributed by the Mysuru Milk Union towards setting up the mega dairy while ₹6 crore and ₹80 crore had been raised through Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY) and the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB).
In the second phase, a 30-metric tonne capacity milk powder unit will come up on the premises. The milk powder unit is estimated to cost ₹59 crore for the milk union.
Milk production in Mysuru district is expected to touch 10 lakh litres a day from the present six lakh litres a day in a year or two. The existing dairy in Siddharthanagar has a processing capacity of three lakh litres a day.
The old dairy was started with an initial capacity to process 60,000 litres of milk and cannot be expanded any longer because of space constraints.
The mega dairy is equipped to produce 25,000 kg butter a day with a deep freezer for storing the produce. The mega dairy will receive milk only through tankers about one lakh litres of curd can be produced daily. The union has proposed to use the old dairy plant for storing butter and skimmed milk powder.
More than 50 tankers arrive daily to the dairy to offload milk collected from producers across Mysuru district. This is in addition to the milk supplied in other modes.
