Otgo Dashdorj sings when she milks her cows before dawn on the Mongolian steppe, and her husband sings with her. Calm cows give more milk, she explains, and keeping them calm has become harder as drought and rising costs reshape dairy farming in Mongolia. Her story was published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on 2 September.

Otgo is one of more than 1,700 farmers in Töv province who supply raw milk to APU Dairy, part of one of Mongolia's oldest and largest beverage producers. For 27 years she and her husband were nomadic pastoral herders. Harsh winters, dry summers and grasslands degraded by overgrazing and climate change made it ever harder to reach good pasture and water in spring, so three years ago they settled, built fixed infrastructure and began managing their herd year-round from one place.

They now plan to double the herd to 40 dairy cows and to move into a fully equipped cluster farm — an arrangement, increasingly popular in Mongolia, in which small dairy farmers pool resources and share milk collection, cooling and veterinary services to stabilise supply through the year.

The transition is backed by a programme of FAO's Investment Centre and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), funded by the Government of Canada under the High-Impact Partnership on Climate Action (HIPCA), working with APU Dairy and the Dairy Development Board of Mongolia to raise the efficiency, sustainability and climate resilience of local dairy farms.

"The changing of the four seasons creates different sets of risks and added costs for managing our herd," Otgo says, "but winter is the toughest." The year before last, snow reached the top of her fences. That was the dzud, a slow-onset disaster unique to Mongolia of extreme cold, deep snow, ice cover and scarce grazing. The 2023–2024 dzud, one of the most severe in years, caused over USD 820 million in estimated economic damages and losses to the national livestock sector.

The FAO-EBRD team used FAO's OpenForis Arena Mobile field data application to analyse current milk production systems and their environmental footprint. That data underpins a monitoring, reporting and verification system for tracking sustainability, FAO-developed investment blueprints, and an e-extension app built on FAO's Digital Service Portfolio. Farmers can use the app for advice on feed rations and on low-emission, climate-smart practices such as high-quality feed and drought-resistant forage that ease pressure on grazing land. Staff of the Dairy Development Board, which now runs an extension service for farmers and herders, have been trained in climate-smart dairy and efficient feeding.

The couple intend to pass the farm to their son, a veterinarian — a sign, FAO says, that dairy farming is being made a viable way of life for the next generation. Otgo's own inheritance for him is simpler: "Milk output is higher when the cows are calm. We talk to them like we do with people, sing to them." FAO marks 2026 as both the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists and the International Year of the Woman Farmer.

Source: FAO Newsroom. Photo: ©EBRD