From one cow to more than a hundred: Ishwardi dairy farmer Amirul Islam

Amirul Islam, a dairy farmer of Barompur village in Lakshmikunda union of Ishwardi upazila in Pabna, began with a single crossbred cow that he bought for Tk 14,600 in 1994 on his mother's instruction. When Jagonews24 told his story on 27 April 2025, his Tanmoy Dairy Farm, set on 22 bighas of land, had more than a hundred cattle and, by his own account, produced 450 to 500 litres of milk a day. Besides the milk, the farm turned cow dung into biogas, vermicompost and Trichoderma organic fertiliser, and it also kept buffaloes, garole sheep and chickens. Over the years he had sold milk and calves worth lakhs of taka a year, the report said.

His work had brought national recognition. The report said he had been honoured as one of the country's best farmers and had received the Agriculturally Important Person (AIP) honour, which it described as the country's highest honour for farmers. Dan W Mozena, a former United States ambassador to Bangladesh, had visited the farm; according to the report he patted Amirul on the back and said: "I am overwhelmed and charmed to see your farm. Keep going on the road to success."

The road to that point was not smooth, the report said. Through hard work, skill and good judgement Amirul faced many crises and problems before he established himself as a successful farmer, and his farm had by then become a place where other farmers, trainees and students came to learn.

Ishwardi is one of the nine upazilas of Pabna district in Rajshahi division. Banglapedia, the national encyclopaedia, gives its area as 250.89 square kilometres and says the Ganges, known in Bangladesh as the Padma, forms its southern and western boundary. Its main rivers are the Padma and the Kamala, and Pati Beel is its best-known wetland. The upazila has seven unions: Dashuria, Pakshi, Muladuli, Lakshmikunda, Sara, Sahapur and Silimpur. The 2011 population census, as Banglapedia records it, counted 313,932 people there.

Farming is the largest single source of income in Ishwardi, supporting about a third of households (33.63 per cent in Banglapedia's figures). The main crops are paddy, wheat, sugarcane, betel leaf, potato, onion and vegetables, and the main fruits include mango, jackfruit, litchi, papaya and lemon. In its list of the upazila's farms Banglapedia counts 170 dairy farms, 28 poultry farms and 12 fisheries.

The upazila is also a centre of agricultural research. The Bangladesh Sugarcane Research Institute is based at Ishwardi, about 190 kilometres north-west of Dhaka. It grew out of a sugarcane seedling testing station set up in Dhaka in 1931 and became an autonomous institute under an act of parliament in 1996; Banglapedia also lists a regional agricultural research centre and a pulses research centre in the upazila. The Hardinge Bridge, a steel railway bridge 1.8 kilometres long, crosses the Padma at Sara between Paksey and Bheramara stations; it was built between 1910 and 1912 and opened on 4 March 1915.

Barompur lies in the river's char country. Amirul described himself to Jagonews24 as "an ordinary man from a remote village in the Padma-washed char area", and an October 2022 report on him in the Bengali edition of The Daily Star also described his village as a remote char area on the bank of the Padma.

Amirul is the son of the late Nabir Uddin and the late Amena Khatun of Barompur. He was the only son among seven children. In 1990, while he was studying for a BSc at Ishwardi Government College, his father died, and Amirul had to take charge of the household while still a student. Running the family meant giving up his studies.

Describing how the farm began, he told the paper: "In 1990, when I was a BSc examinee, my father died of cancer. After his death our farming stopped for a while, and we sold the cattle and goats we had at home. In 1994 my mother said, 'We are not used to throwing away rice starch and vegetable scraps. I have fed these to cattle and goats all my life. Arrange to buy a cow.' On her instruction, in 1994 I bought a crossbred cow from the next village for Tk 14,600. Every year I kept the female calves that this cow gave, and so the number of cattle grew one by one. At one point I decided to start a cattle farm."

With the money saved from selling that cow's milk and calves, and some more from his mother, he built a shed for the farm. That was the beginning of his commercial dairy. The number of cows rose every year and the farm grew in size, and over the following three decades, the report said, its success story went a long way.

By April 2025 the farm, named Tanmoy Dairy Farm, stood on 22 bighas of land and had more than a hundred cattle. Eight workers were employed in rearing the animals and the other work of the farm, Amirul said. The report called the farm a model for farmers around the country: hundreds of farmers taking part in government training on setting up dairy farms visited it and took his advice, and students of agricultural universities came to see a working farm and gain practical experience.

A large part of the land was given over to growing grass. "There is no alternative to growing grass if you want to rear cattle," he said. Alongside the cows, the farm kept buffaloes, garole sheep and chickens. The sheep and chickens met the family's need for meat and eggs, and some were sold.

The garole is a small sheep of the Bengal delta, a microsheep of West Bengal that India's Central Sheep and Wool Research Institute brought into its breeding work in 1997 to raise prolificacy, and its high rate of multiple births is linked to the Booroola fertility gene (FecB). The breed's fertility has a long history: according to the history of the Australian Booroola Merino, Bengali Garole sheep were taken from Calcutta to the new English settlement at Sydney as a source of meat in the early 1790s, and the highly fertile Garole is the source of the gene that gives the Booroola strain its frequent multiple births.

Amirul gave the paper his own figures for the farm's output. "My farm produces 450 to 500 litres of milk a day, with a market value of Tk 22,000 to 26,000," he said. Calves, garole sheep, eggs and organic fertiliser were sold as well. "Farmers like me can earn Tk 30 lakh even after paying workers' wages and other costs," he said. "Anyone building a dairy farm must do other work like mine alongside rearing cattle. Only then will the farm be profitable and the farmer succeed."

The farm made use of its dung in three ways. "Alongside milk, I produce biogas from cow dung on this farm," Amirul said. "The gas runs my two generators and meets the cooking needs of my own house and the houses around it." Vermicompost and Trichoderma organic fertiliser were also made from the dung and sold, bringing in more income.

Biogas, as Banglapedia explains it, is made by microbes that break down organic matter in the absence of air, a process known as anaerobic digestion. The gas is mainly methane and carbon dioxide. Cow dung, with a carbon to nitrogen ratio of about 20 to 1, is considered a suitable material. Gas production works within a temperature range of 10 to 35 degrees Celsius, best at 33 to 35 degrees, and at a pH of 6.5 to 7.5.

The same entry notes that burning dung directly as dung cakes loses its value as fertiliser and pollutes the air, while a biogas plant gives both a cleaner fuel and a treated slurry that can go back to the fields as manure. It says a family-size digester of 3 cubic metres can meet the cooking and lighting needs of a family of seven or eight, using 60 to 70 kilograms of cow dung that five or six cattle, or three or four buffaloes, can supply.

Bangladesh has worked on the technology since the early 1970s, when the Bangladesh Agricultural University in Mymensingh and the Bangladesh Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (BCSIR) in Dhaka began adapting and demonstrating family-size digesters. The first family-size digester, a floating-dome design of 3 cubic metres, was installed at BCSIR in 1976. Because the gas holders of those early digesters leaked, a fixed-dome design, built entirely below ground, was installed at BCSIR in 1991.

Vermicompost is compost made with the help of earthworms. A study published in the Journal of Bangladesh Academy of Sciences in August 2018, by researchers from the Palli Daridro Bimochon Foundation and the University of Dhaka, describes vermicomposting as a process in which earthworms turn organic matter into a stable, humus-like product; applied to soil, it can raise microbial activity, nutrient availability and fertility. The study set up a plant at Doulatpur in Kushtia to make organic fertiliser from cow dung and crop residues, with a target of 10 tonnes a month, and ran it through three cycles of 120 days each. Laboratory analysis found the product's nutrient ratios suitable for farmland.

Trichoderma is a genus of soil fungi used to protect crops against soil-borne disease. In a paper published in December 2018 in Microbiology and Biotechnology Letters, M Iqbal Faruk of the Plant Pathology Division of the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) in Joydebpur described a Tricho-compost made from a mixed substrate of cow dung, rice bran and poultry refuse colonised by the fungus Trichoderma harzianum. Tested against foot and root rot of wheat caused by the fungus Sclerotium rolfsii, applying the Tricho-compost to the soil cut seedling deaths, sped up plant growth and raised yield, and in the trials it worked better than treating the seed.

Farmers' views of the product were studied in Bogura district. A survey of 66 farmers at a water-saving project site, carried out from January to March 2020 and published in the Asian Journal of Agricultural Extension, Economics and Sociology, found that two-thirds of them had a high knowledge of Trichoderma. They saw benefits in better soil health, easy application, low production cost and greater effectiveness than traditional compost, yet many were still reluctant to adopt it because it was not a traditional compost.

How much vermicompost or Tricho-compost to apply depends on the crop and the soil. Farmers who want to make or use either should take the advice of the upazila agriculture office.

Amirul said he did not want to prosper alone. "One cannot develop oneself or the area by farming alone," he said. "So besides building my own farm, I encouraged more than a hundred people in this village to start farms, and many of them have become financially solvent. I sell calves from my farm to farmers in my village so that they can raise improved breeds and develop their farms quickly."

With more than a hundred farmers of the village he formed the Pakuria Primary Milk Producers' Cooperative Society Ltd. Founded in 2006, it had over a hundred members. Its milk went to Milk Vita, and some was sold in local markets to meet demand there.

Milk Vita is the trade name of the Bangladesh Milk Producers' Co-operative Union Limited. According to Banglapedia, the union works in six milk-shed areas, Tangail, Manikganj, Tekerhat, Baghabarighat, Rangpur and Sreenagar, and collects milk through its primary cooperative societies: it is the central union of 345 primary societies with about 40,000 farmer members. To join a village society a farmer must own a milking cow, buy a share of Tk 10 and pay Tk 1 as an admission fee, and must supply at least 150 litres of milk a year to stay a member. Members bring milk twice a day, and the price is set by its fat and solid-not-fat content. Milk from the Rangpur and Baghabarighat areas is processed at the Baghabarighat plant into powdered milk, butter and ghee.

In a report of 30 May 2024 The Business Standard said Milk Vita collected 2.3 lakh litres of milk from farmers a day, of which 1.3 lakh litres went into powdered milk and 60,000 to 70,000 litres became pasteurised liquid milk. Its chairman told the paper that the firm made 22 products.

The Daily Star's October 2022 report said Milk Vita had set up a chilling centre in Ishwardi because the supply of milk from Amirul's farm was reliable, and that the farms in his village and nearby areas, which had followed his example, produced about 1,500 to 2,000 litres of milk a day.

In a report of 1 June 2021 The Business Standard described Pabna as having become the country's main cow's milk producing region, and quoted the Pabna district livestock office as saying there were around 20,000 small and large dairy farms in the district. The paper put daily cow's milk production in the district at about 8 to 10 lakh litres, of which milk companies including Milk Vita collected about 5 to 6 lakh litres. Chhana makers used more than a lakh litres a day in more than a hundred establishments in the district, and a milk producers' cooperative in Faridpur upazila of Pabna told the paper that it supplied Milk Vita's plant at Baghabari in Sirajganj.

At national level, milk output had risen sharply. The Business Standard's report of May 2024 said production stood at about 50.7 lakh tonnes in the 2012-13 fiscal year, according to the Department of Livestock Services (DLS), and had passed 1.40 crore tonnes in 2022-23. Citing the latest DLS data, it put daily production at 221 millilitres per person, against the 250 millilitres it gave as the World Health Organization standard, and said about 89 per cent of the country's demand was met from local sources. Only 2.58 per cent of the milk produced was processed by companies; the largest share went into sweets. The report also said more than 20 lakh dairy farms operated in the country, of which 65,554 were registered with the government.

Asked how a dairy farm can be made profitable, Amirul said farmers should not depend on milk alone. They must produce biogas and organic fertiliser from the dung and have their own arrangement for growing grass, the main ingredient of cattle feed. "A farmer who grows his own grass will certainly succeed," he said. Other feed must be given too, he added, but the farmer must understand that grass is the main food of cattle.

He also warned against starting big. "Farmers cannot afford to be emotional," he said. "A farm started by buying milking cows will find it hard to be sustainable." Instead, he said, farmers should begin with calves, so that by the time the calves have grown into full cows the farmer has gained complete knowledge and experience of rearing them.

His dream for the future, he said, was to build a large milk village in the area: not only producing milk, but also making nutritious and tasty foods from it and marketing them.

Asked about his achievements, Amirul said: "I am an ordinary man from a remote village in the Padma-washed char area. I thank Almighty Allah for the honour and dignity I have received through dairy farming. Former US ambassador Dan W Mozena came to visit my farm. Secretaries and other senior government officials, vice-chancellors of agricultural universities, scientists and researchers, and hundreds of farmers and students have come. I consider this the greatest reward of my life."

He listed the honours the farm had brought him: the National Farm Bronze Medal in 2012, the National Cooperative Award in 2013, the Prothom Alo Agriculture Award, honours from an agricultural institution in Mymensingh and from the Rural Development Academy (RDA) in Bogura, the Dairy Icon gold medal in 2021, the National Agriculture Gold Medal in 2022 and the AIP honour in 2024. The RDA, according to Banglapedia, is a rural development training and research institute founded in 1973 at Sherpur in Bogura district, which runs skill training in livestock, poultry, fisheries and horticulture for officials, cooperative members, farmers and young people.

Other reports confirm the main awards. The Daily Star's October 2022 report said the livestock ministry had honoured him with the Dairy Icon medal in 2021 and that he had received the gold medal for dairy at the national agriculture award ceremony in 2022. On 7 July 2024, bdnews24.com reported, the Ministry of Agriculture gave the AIP honour to 22 people at a ceremony at the Osmani Memorial Auditorium in Dhaka; among them, in the group for agricultural production and commercial farms, was Md Amirul Islam, owner of Tanmoy Dairy Farm in Ishwardi, Pabna, honoured for dairy production.

The same report explained the honour. The ministry drew up the AIP policy in 2019 and has given the honour since 2020. The card is valid for one year and gives privileges similar to those of a Commercially Important Person, including a certificate from the ministry, a pass to enter the Bangladesh Secretariat, invitations to national civic receptions, priority in booking seats on government air, rail, road and water transport, priority for cabins in government hospitals for the holder and family, and use of the VIP lounge at airports.

Dan W Mozena, the former ambassador Amirul named, took office as the United States ambassador to Bangladesh in November 2011, after an earlier posting as ambassador to Angola.

Idris Ali, a farmer from Barompur, said hundreds of small and large farms had grown up in Barompur and the villages around it by following Amirul's example. "Every one of our farms has a biogas plant, and many of us make organic fertiliser from the dung for our own land and for sale," he said. "If any farmer or any cow has a problem, Amirul bhai comes at once, and with his help many problems are solved quickly. He is a very big-hearted man. The government has honoured him with various awards as a model farmer, and Barompur and the whole upazila are proud of his success."

Aklima Khatun, Ishwardi Upazila Livestock Officer, said Amirul Islam was a successful farmer who had won various national awards in recognition of that success, and that her office had been helping him as far as it could.

Photo: Ibrahim Husain Meraj / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0). The top picture shows the dairy farm of the Rural Development Academy in Bogura, as background.

Sources: Jagonews24 (27 April 2025), The Daily Star Bangla (15 October 2022), bdnews24.com (7 July 2024), The Business Standard (1 June 2021 and 30 May 2024), Banglapedia, Microbiology and Biotechnology Letters (BARI, 2018), Journal of Bangladesh Academy of Sciences (2018), Asian Journal of Agricultural Extension, Economics and Sociology (2020)