Drink milk & have a healthy heart
Milk is an essential part of everyone’s diet. Filipinos, however, have limited access to the freshest, best-quality milk possible. With the country importing 99 percent of its dairy, most Pinoys aren’t drinking milk at its peak freshness and most nutritional form. My college friend and “brother” Jovy Hernandez, president and CEO of Metro Pacific Agro Ventures (MPAV), the newest holdings company of businessman Manny V. Pangilinan, said MPAV is here to make world-class quality dairy more accessible to Filipinos.
“By modernizing and advocating the underserved agricultural industry as a whole, Filipinos will have better access to the power that a glass of high-quality fresh milk can provide for the body,” said Jovy after the groundbreaking ceremony of the 22-hectare, P2-billion project in Bay, Laguna.
He noted, “Drinking fresh milk, experts say, can help promote heart health, combat hypertension, and reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes.”
Jovy said by implementing high-tech milking parlors, modern facilities, giving the cows the best nutrition, and giving them the best living conditions, Philippine dairy farms can increase milk production instead of relying heavily on imported products. MPAV, in partnership with Israel’s LR Group, envisions a self-sustained dairy-producing country with the launch of Metro Pacific Dairy Farms (MPDF) — a state-of-the-art facility with 1,000 cows, 600 of which are for milking. They will also be using modern technologies like putting pedometers on cows so their steps can be monitored as well as their overall health condition. Talk about modernization meets sustainability.
“MPAV was envisioned to be the holdings company under Metro Pacific Investments Corp. (MPIC) that will house all agricultural investments.
“MPIC has been focused on infrastructure businesses — telco, power, water, toll roads, hospitals or health, etc. Agri is definitely an infrastructure pillar of any economy and is going to be key in the development of the Philippines,” Jovy said, adding that the state-of-theart dairy facility of the MPAV can serve as a gateway to improving the production of dairy and dairy products in the Philippines.
“Beyond business and profits, as our chairman Manny Pangilinan would say, we have to feed our people first. MPAV will do its share in trying to alleviate the country’s food security position.”
Improving the agricultural sector, Jovy said, is one way the country can become more self-sufficient. He said one integral part of this sector is dairy, which includes fresh milk, ice cream, yoghurt and cheese.
Jovy, who finished Agricultural Economics at UP Los Baños before studying at the Asian Institute of Management, said the average age of farmers in the country is “nearing 70 already and more interesting is the fact that none of their kids are interested in agriculture.” He said MPAV wants to make agriculture “sexy” again by applying technology and modern farming practices at the heart of its strategy. This will hopefully entice the younger generation to be involved again in agriculture.
The first agricultural salvo of MPAV is acquiring the famous ice cream brand Carmen’s Best. “We feel that Carmen’s Best has a very good product and a very good brand. We view Carmen’s Best, though, not as an ice cream business but as a dairy business — and there is an opportunity to grow it by establishing Metro Pacific Dairy Farms,” said Jovy, also the CEO of Carmen’s Best. (Jovy is also the president and CEO of Metro Pacific Logistics Co., Inc. and former president and CEO of ePLDT and former SVP and head of Enterprise Business of PLDT and Smart.)
He said, “This venture will increase the number of milking cows that we have from 90 to 600. The total herd will be about 1,000 but the capacity of MPDF will be about 2,000 cows.”
He added: “By employing the latest technologies in dairy and applying modern farming practices, we aim to increase milk yield from 11.5 liters/cow/day to 30-40 liters/cow/day. This means that MPDF will be able to produce 6.5 million liters of raw milk annually. This is a boost in productivity and yield.”
In this undertaking, Jovy said MPAV entered into a 60:40 joint venture with LR Group, an Israeli group that has been doing agriculture projects globally for the past two decades.
“An important aspect is that 99 percent of the country’s dairy demand is imported. Seventy percent of that 99 percent are all powder-based milk products. With MPDF, we will be able to produce locally 100-percent fresh milk that is world-class quality and provide the Filipino consumer world-class quality dairy products that are truly 100 percent. Fresh is always best…and the Filipino deserves nothing less than fresh.”
For his part, Toby Gatchalian, chief commercial officer of MPAV, said, “This is MPAV’s contribution to bringing something fresh, healthy, and most of all, enjoyable, to our consumers who are looking not just for world-class dairy, but are seeking ways to support what they believe in, as we give back to the local communities we serve. We also look forward to future retail partnerships, which will be our greatest enabler to bring this fresh offering closer to the Filipino shopper — because the Filipino consumer deserves nothing less than fresh.”
Jovy said the venture will have a solar farm within the facility to make dairy production more sustainable. A water-treatment facility will also be established to provide the cows human-grade drinking water. The processing plant will be fully automated so there is limited to no human contamination from milking the cow all the way to packaging the milk. This, he said, will hopefully increase shelf life of fresh milk.
The farm will be producing its own silage and modern barns. Jovy said, “Happy cows produce more milk and the best-quality milk.”
On the subject of happiness, Jovy said he’s able to “happily do all my jobs” because he makes sure he has a “happy family.”
“My wife Det — we’ve been married for 29 years — has always been my inspiration. As they say, behind the success of every man is a woman. When they ask me, what makes me happy? As long as my wife and my three kids (Lars, 28; Rafi, 18; and Rocky, 12) are happy, I am happy,” Jovy said, adding the love he has for his family has taught him to be “hard-working, patient, humble, and to stay close to God.”
This early, he is more determined to make the dairy farms business of MPAV a success because it is his ode to his children and their generation to “drink milk and have a healthy heart.”
* Let’s drink milk to that!