Where buffaloes moo
KARACHI: Driving up to Landhi you reach an area on the rather bumpy Mehran Highway where pick-ups and lorries number more than the other vehicles. Those coming in are empty but the ones driving out are loaded with dozens of silver milk canisters. Well, of course, why wouldn’t they be? After all, this is Bhains Colony, the place the entire city gets its milk from.
You can pick up some moos coming from various directions. But there are hardly any cattle roaming about freely here or there. That’s because they are all doing the work inside the dairy farms on either side of the road. The animals there eat and drink all day to stay healthy and be able to produce lots and lots of good quality milk.
“We milk our buffaloes twice in 24 hours — at 4am and 4pm,” says Imtiaz Ahmed, one of the staff supervisors at Shaukat Mukhtar Farms. There are some 450 buffaloes at the farm and almost all are lined up to enjoy their feed as the men milk them manually by hand.
“Eating keeps them busy. So as they munch on their feed they stay in one place for us to be able to milk them,” he says. To ensure that the dairy workers don’t get kicked in the face by the buffaloes, they also lightly tie up their hind legs while milking them.
Asked why they don’t have pumps for milking, he explains that there are pumps too at several dairy farms in Bhains Colony, but at their farms they prefer to milk by hand. “Usually, we use pumps to milk cows, not buffaloes. Cows give more milk, too. Pumps are good for milking in quantity. But cows’ milk is thin while buffalo milk is thicker and richer,” he explains.