M7 launches Vital Tomosi Dairy plant in Kiruhura
President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni yesterday launched a new dairy plant in Kiruhura. The plant is Vital Tomosi Dairy who are the producers of Milkman brand.
“Today afternoon, in Rushere, Kiruhura District, I commissioned the Vital Tomosi milk processing factory, producers of the Milkman brand of UHT milk and yoghurt.
This is one of the fruits of our sensitization efforts dating back to 1966 when Mwesigwa Black and I, started to dissuade our parents and community from the practices of nomadism and subsistence cattle keeping.
The mindset at the time was largely pre-capitalist but we took a lesson from the exposure we had at school in Mbarara and brought the knowledge back home.
When we had made headway with the general concept, we then started sensitization on enterprise selection. At the time, there had been mass conscription of wanainchi into growing of cash crops such as tobacco, coffee and cotton.
The local people, without vast lands, ultimately could not get out of poverty. So we encouraged our people to look into high milk-yielding breeds of cows, instead of depending entirely on our local breeds.
Therefore, I am pleased to commission this factory, which processes 100,000 litres of milk daily. I commend the Israeli investor, Eytan Stibbe of Vital Capital Fund, and their local partners, Odrek and Patience Rwabwogo, for setting up this facility.
I am pleased to see such partnerships and hope that more of the same can be fostered in different parts of the country, especially with focus on value-addition to agricultural produce,” M7 said.
Odrek Rwabwogo one of the brains behind the factory said launching of the dairy plant is a culmination of 55 years of hard work on this land from peasantry when his parents, born again Christians, settled on the land and begun to raise production of crops and animals. “My wife and I begun changes on this land in 1997 and by 2012 we had found strategic partners to support our vision to process products within our community. Work on the plant begun in 2014, completed in 2016 and our first products went to the market at the beginning of 2017. I thank God for our community of faithful farmers, my family, the Tomosi group staff and board and all our customers and suppliers who believed this vision of “Made in Africa”,” Rwabwogo said.
