Voice of Mongolia
Black goats and niche products

I'd like to tell you about how my hobby became my job and why I work in cheesemaking today. I initially studied radiotherapy in Germany before going on to work with cancer patients in the healthcare sector. In 2013, my family founded the Five Rivers tourist camp in the place of the same name in Khuvsgul province in northern Mongolia. The campsite is a collection of traditional tents known as yurts, or 'ger' as we call them in Mongolia. It was in this stunning area that I first saw thousands of black goats grazing freely among the charming green mountains and valleys.

The local herders rear these goats for their wool – which produces the world's finest and most expensive cashmere. However, the goats are hardly ever milked, and if they are, then only for the family's own use. Unfortunately, this is still a widespread practice in Mongolia. Because milking goats isn't lucrative enough for the herders: the price milk fetches on the market is far too low, and transporting milk to the cities is laborious and difficult.

When I observed this practice among the herders at Five Rivers, I began talking to some of the families and thinking about how this extremely valuable and healthy goat milk could be used. I couldn't stop thinking about it, and eventually I came up with the idea of producing cheese. At first I wanted to make the cheese purely from goat milk, only in summer, and only for the visitors staying at the camp. But after much thought, I changed my mind: as we all know, milk is produced every day and needs to be processed on a daily basis.

Because I had previously studied in Germany and could speak the language, I was able to attend a number of courses there on various aspects of cheesemaking. I learned the basics of milk composition, different cheesemaking methods, potential production errors and, finally, the essentials of efficient management. My husband and I set up a small dairy with 30 cows in 2017. It's situated about 130 kilometres from the capital Ulaanbaatar. We've built our own barn for the cows to protect them from the extreme cold, especially in winter. Cows and all other animals (sheep, goats, etc.) here normally roam freely outdoors all year round and only have access to a semi-open shelter.

After months of trials, I'm proud that we're now able to offer our customers various cheese products. We're actually producing niche products, such as a Camembert, which are still hard to find on the market – and any you can find will have been imported from Europe. There's still hardly any Mongolian cheese on the market, although it would be easy to find customers for it.

When it comes to milk processing, there's a lot of catching-up to be done in Mongolia: there still isn't much expertise in this country, and definitely not at the level of Germany or Switzerland, for example. That's why we looked for a specialist in the field via the Senior Expert Service, a German foundation. After roughly four years, the wait finally came to an end in August 2022 when master cheesemaker Carlos Marbach from Switzerland visited us on an initial assignment. With his expertise and passion, he helped us to optimise and standardise the production processes and expand our range of cheeses. We very much hope to work with our master cheesemaker again in the next few years.