The Livestock Healthcare Office in Gunungterang village is the only one of its kind to have been established as a self-supporting project in Lampung province. The citizens of Gunungterang village felt that they needed to build an office because they realized that they could make money only by raising healthy livestock. To support their aims, some trained livestock healthcare volunteers (sukakeswan) were ready to help the farmers check their animals’ health.
“We actually deliberately combined this activity with the celebration of Kartini Day so that all the women in our villages who wanted to take part could get involved,” said Masmudah, the head of Gunungterang village. “All those women helped their husbands to make Gunungterang village a successful ‘livestock barn’ in West Lampung.”
Gunungterang, known locally as Pekon, is one of the villages in Lampung that has successfully carried out the Economic Development Program and Society Conservation around the Forests project.
The project combines various activities carried out by the villagers to save the forests through building the citizens’ economic base. The ways chosen include goat husbandry, developing organic farms and developing mixed plantations in a critical area of the Bukit Rigis forest, which is near the village.
“Before the program was introduced we had a village meeting which everyone came to,” Masmudah said. “As well as our plan to rescue the forests we also listed the poor families that live in the village.
All the villagers had the right to determine whether their families or their neighbors’ families are poor or not. The poor families had the right to get assistance by being given livestock.”
The forest rescue program for Bukit Rigis has been underway since 2000, but the new Pekon program started in 2006, at the time the Goat Aid program was introduced, allocating a total of 480 Etawa-mix goats to 120 households in the village.
The Goat Aid program from Heifer International Indonesia since expanded to involve 516 goats. The extra goats were added to the first batch thanks to aid received from the West Lampung regency government. With breeding within the village, there are now 1,600 goats, among a total of 743 households.
These goats, bred in the village, have become an additional source of income for the families that farm in the region bordered by the area known as Protected Forest Registration 45B Bukit Rigis.
But what do goats have to do with the environment?
The program is based on the notion that the process of land conservation speeds up if there’s an improvement in villagers’ standard of living. The plan behind the aid program is to ensure all villagers can own goats that they can use to boost their incomes.
By giving the villagers an alternative source of income, the Bukit Rigis forest is green again. Members of different groups in Gunungterang village – Tani Hijau Kembali, Tani Rigis Jaya, Tani Muncul Tani Jaya and Tani Wana Mandiri –have helped repair the critical damage to the land by managing mixed plantations. On the plantations, farmers grow coffee, bananas, areca nuts, peppers, turmeric and vegetables. The crops are fertilized with compost that uses goat manure, made by the citizens working together as a group.
Gunungterang citizens have proved that they can develop their livestock holdings. There are other benefits too: The local children are now used to drinking fresh goat’s milk.
Paryoto, the secretary of Gunungterang village, said that in the past year, the villagers had started to sell goat’s milk through a collective, after first pasteurizing the milk at a control center.
“The control center belongs to all the farmers working together. Apart from helping to sell the milk, the control center also functions as an authority issuing certificates confirming whether or not the milk produced by the farmers is suitable for sale,” Paryoto said.
“The control center buys the goat’s milk from citizens for Rp 10,000 a liter. Then we sell that milk to the organic shops for Rp 20,000 a liter. The resulting profit from the sales will be divided once a year.”
Supported by Watala (an environmental NGO in Lampung), Heifer International Indonesia and the regional government of West Lampung, the Gunungterang villagers increasingly believe that farming goats and developing organic agriculture will bring them greater prosperity.
“We have rules on how to properly farm livestock so that farmers take a really responsible attitude toward the livestock which they will breed,” Paryoto said. “We also have a rule that prohibits the village communities from selling nanny goats that are still productive. Anyone who breaks the rules can be expelled from the association and can’t join other farming groups.”
But there is still plenty of extra work to be done, he added. “Now we are trying to get a permit from the Oba Supervisory Agency and the Food and Trade Department, and the Health Department to make sure that the goat’s milk that we’re marketing wins consumers’ trust.”
