Tea major Goodricke to foray into dairy business

As a part of company’s long-term plan for integration, Indian Tea major The Goodricke Group Ltd has planned to enter into dairy business in a big way and will soon seek the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) approval for it.

"We have licences only to grow tea and tea-related business. (For) anything that we want to diversify into, we have to take permission from the RBI," Goodricke Group MD and CEO A.N. Singh told reporters on the sidelines of the company's annual general meeting here.

The company was busy in research and development on this front for the last two years at Jalpaiguri in North Bengal. After the initial success now the Group intends to foray into dairy business seeking permission from the Reserve Bank of India.

“Presently there are 120 cows, brought from Punjab at our R&D centre near Lakkhipara in Jalpaiguri. We are getting average 500 liters of milk and enough cow-dung and cow-urine and using that as natural manure and pesticides,” he said.

Company has to spend five to six per cent of its total expenses for fertilizers on an average of Rs 6000 per hectare. “Use of indigenous fertilizer and pesticides (read, cow-dung and cow urine) can bring it down by 25 to 30 percent”, claimed Singh.

The company’s plan is targeted as backward and forward integration with its tea and tea-related business. Company has been facing stiff resistance in export market due to use of chemical fertilizer and pesticides. Cow-dung and cow-urine are the cheapest and best alternatives to that. At the same time, milk and milk product can be of its other area of domestic and export business.

“North Bengal is milk-shortage area, where milk produced in our farm can easily get good market. Also we can look for export market to Japan and other countries. After complains against Chinese milk, India’s scope for milk export has gone up.”

The company’s plan is to have nearly 20,000 cows. The modern and scientific Goodricke Dairy will come up on nearly 15 acre non-fertile land at Lakkhipara. This would shift the company to a vermin-composting tea growers expanding scope of export in Europe and US.