Today, like yesterday and the day before, we will again send about 4 tons of finished cheese to retail outlets and networks (yes, our cheese is already in full swing and is sold there!). EVERY DAY! And it will be dismantled by about 250 thousand people.
Photo: Ivan MAKEEV. Go to Photobank KP
Happy holidays, dear readers! What does “with which” mean? Happy decade of import substitution, of course!
On August 6, 2014, in response to Western sanctions against Russia, Presidential Decree No. 560 “On the Application of Certain Special Economic Measures to Ensure the Security of the Russian Federation” was issued, prohibiting the import of certain types of agricultural products into the country. The food embargo became an incentive for the development of domestic agriculture.
Then, as soon as he heard about the counter-sanctions, Moscow IT specialist Oleg Sirota left his previous occupation and plunged headlong into import substitution, starting to build a cheese factory. Oleg told about all his steps on the path to Russian Parmesan cheese in the pages of Komsomolskaya Pravda, which published his “Cheesemaker’s Diaries” for several years. Today he decided to sum up the interim results and return to the old diaries to tell about the successes that Russian farmers have achieved over these 10 years.
“4 TONS OF CHEESE. EVERY DAY!”
…I leave the office and sit on the porch, surrounded by a pile of papers (yes, yes, I have a lot of them now). Despite the early morning, every day there is a lot of hustle and bustle: milk trucks arrive, schoolchildren have sent the cows out to pasture, smoke rises from the bakery, the first excursion buses arrive and the cheese factory opens its doors. Children run after the rabbits (we have them free) and then in groups they go to look at the heifers, sheep, goats, otters and raccoons. In the next room robots run around, turning the cheese and placing it on the shelves, and there is an elegant Russian-made cheese cutter. The cheese factory itself was not started, but never finished: now the cheese is made 24 hours a day, no one can stop us!
I was distracted from contemplating this already familiar pastoral by the assistants who brought another pile of documents. Today, like yesterday and the day before, we will again send about 4 tons of finished cheese to sales outlets and networks (yes, our cheese is already in full swing and is sold there!). EVERY DAY! And about 250 thousand people will dismantle it. It’s crazy, I never dreamed of this 10 years ago.
I close my eyes for a moment and recall another image where none of this was there. It’s 2014, a hilly field overgrown with weeds, my pockets are empty and my head is full of ambitious, often conflicting thoughts. And a periodically overwhelming feeling of anxiety: did I do everything right when I enthusiastically accepted the idea of import substitution and decided to move from IT to agriculture? And again I go through the stages of formation in my head…
It’s 2014, a hilly countryside overgrown with scrub, my pockets are empty and my head is full of ambitious and often conflicting thoughts.
Photo: Victor GUSEINOV. Go to Photobank KP
“DO YOU REMEMBER HOW IT ALL STARTED?”
Memories of first steps awaken seemingly forgotten emotions, even tears. I approach my horned beauty, Merkel the goat, scratch her behind the ears and feed her her favourite cornflowers, which she eats immediately, looking into her eyes as if asking me: do you remember how it all began?
Here, where children and their mothers are now playing, trying to catch the rabbits, there was a tent where I moved to live for the first time, having sold everything I had for nothing. And then I see myself again: the first night in the camp. Sleepless night: were you excited, Oleg, did you weigh everything correctly? And there were many similar nights and experiences.
The construction of the cheese factory was already underway, and suddenly the money ran out. I remember that at some point I felt despair: it seemed like a complete dead end. I remember how much nonsense and criticism was poured out, how they wrote that nothing would work out, because the Russians have their hands in the wrong place and nature does not give them the opportunity to cook high-quality cheeses… I remember how I knocked on the doors of banks and tried to get the first loans, but the rates were the same as now, with the only difference that then they did not grant me anything…
I had to raise money through crowdfunding (when an entrepreneur raises money for his project via the Internet – Ed.) according to the scheme: pay for the cheese, which you will receive later. I remember how you (ordinary people who helped raise money through crowdfunding – Ed.) helped – participated in the enterprise, and this saved the farm and the idea itself. You sent money to buy raw cheese and helped in a very difficult time, for which I am still grateful to you.
But the problems did not end there: along the way it turned out that we simply did not have raw milk. My colleagues and I went around the farms and practically on our knees begged the farmers to feed the cows with normal feed and wash the udders before milking…
I described all this on social networks, and one day the legendary editor-in-chief of Komsomolskaya Pravda, Vladimir Nikolaevich Sungorkin, became interested in my posts. Then my diaries began to be published in the country’s largest publication. This helped a lot – you started to read, empathize, support… Although there were other commentators who, one after another, invented fairy tales about how “The Orphan brings Italian cheese at night and repackages it under the guise of his own cheese.” But this made me grit my teeth even more – I wanted to prove: we can’t do worse, and even better – we will replace everything with imports!
“EVERYONE CRIED. WE ARE FROM HAPPINESS, FOREIGNERS ARE FROM THE RESULTS.”
I remember it, I remember it all.
Numerous experiments with cheeses, which at first did not always work and then hundreds of kilograms of failed cheese were sent to feed cattle…
First experiences in the sale of mozzarella and yogurt…
The first team, consisting largely of Donetsk miners who lost their jobs, quickly mastered the technology of cheese making…
The flag of Novorossiya, which flies over our cheese factory…
All these years I believed that the Donbass republics would become part of our country, and so it happened. The course of history has changed forever, and so has our country. It has become completely different.
We also believed in ourselves; there were thousands of us. I remember how I gathered a team of aspiring Russian cheesemakers and attended international cheese tournaments. Where we immediately surprised the trendsetters of cheese fashion, the French and the Italians, by taking first place. Everyone then cried: we cried from happiness, the foreigners from resentment and incomprehension: how did the Russians achieve better results in such a short time? Even the jury, which blindly selected the winners, was surprised.
I walk past our mini-museum, where there is a ball with autographs of the French national football team, and fond memories come flooding back. One day in the summer of 2018, a businessman appeared at our cheese factory, started trying everything, and then, to my surprise, ordered about 300 kilograms of cheese: where did he need so much? But it soon turned out: the man turned out to be the chef of the French national football team, the cheese is included in the sports diet he calculated for the footballers, but they could not bring such a volume due to counter-sanctions, and then he started looking for analogues. And he found it here. And then, when France became world champion with our cheese, they signed the ball and gave it to us. In gratitude.
We continued to move forward, uniting in the Union of Cheesemakers of Russia and then in the People’s Association of Farmers to help people like us.
Photo: Oksana ZUYKO. Go to Photobank KP
“IMPORT COMPLETELY REPLACED!”
We continued to move forward, uniting in the Union of Cheese Makers of Russia and then in the People’s Association of Farmers to help people like us: solve problems in the industry, push for new subsidies, change outdated norms and rules. It was our association that helped collect documents for farmers in new regions of the country.
And the first cheese festival, which we dedicated to the opening of our dairy in 2015, has grown over time from a gathering of small farms to the largest cheese fair in Russia. Over the past weekend, more than 120 thousand people visited it, celebrating the 10th anniversary of import substitution, and at the same time they bought 60 tons of cheese, 32 tons of other milk, 10 tons of sausages, ham and other meat products, 8 tons of honey, 10 thousand bottles of wine and other delicacies. Selected Russian delicacies!
Moreover, the festival has gone beyond the commercial platform and has become a real cheese forum with a business program of the sector, where problems and solutions are discussed. Federal ministers, officials and the governor began to come here to talk with farmers. As a direct consequence, preferential programs for cheese makers and farmers were adopted – grants, subsidies and preferential loans of 5%. The Ministry of Industry and Trade created a program for the development of agricultural machinery, and milk machines, cheese boilers, presses and other equipment began to be manufactured in our country.
The first cheese festival, which we dedicated to the opening of our dairy in 2015, has grown over time from a small gathering of farmers to the largest cheese fair in Russia.
Photo: Mikhail FROLOV. Go to Photobank KP
We have done a lot in these 10 years. We have completely replaced imported cheese, its production has doubled over the years, and today there are more than 2 thousand new cheese factories in the country, producing the entire range of possible and impossible cheeses. Yes, there is still a lot to do in agriculture, but I have no doubt that we will be able to cope.
“Oleg, I’m sorry, but we have to approve the plan for the construction of new buildings for the cheese factory,” the assistants distract me again and I put an end to it. But no, not a comma: we continue to expand.
