Swiss-style farming in the Caucasus

Teaching recently got underway at a new Swiss-style college in Georgia, modelled on Plantahof, a renowned agricultural training centre in canton Graubünden in eastern Switzerland.

The Swiss Agricultural School Caucasus at Dmanisi, a town in southern Georgia, offers a two-year programme in cattle breeding and milk processing, trains teachers from state-owned colleges and provides short-term professional training for farmers. It includes a residential section for up to 30 boarders.

Swiss experts on board

The driving force behind the college is Miho Svimonishvili, a Georgian investor and entrepreneur. He participated years ago in a training scheme at Plantahof in Landquart and decided to base the new agricultural school on the Swiss model. Technical help came from Plantahof veterans, Carl Brandenburger and Curdin Foppa, who came out of retirement to lend a hand. Rolf Hanimann, a former cantonal vet in Graubünden, was also a founding father of the Georgia school.

Other Swiss experts joined later. Markus Racine runs the cheese dairy and Josef Horni the on-site farm, with its 60 hectares of pasture land and 40 hectares of arable land. The herd includes 31 Brown Swiss cattle.

One of the farm employees did an apprenticeship at Plantahof earlier this year, before starting work at the Caucasus college. Giorgi Aslamazashvili is an insemination technician. He learnt how to recognise udder infections and detect other diseases in dairy cattle, and more about species-appropriate treatment of farm animals. Swiss conditions are the trademark of the new school.

Swiss government support

The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), the development arm of the Swiss government, supports the college through its project “Modernising agricultural vocational education and training in Georgia”. The agency facilitates the transfer of know-how between Plantahof in Switzerland and the school in Dmanisi, which was built with private funding. 

The SDC cooperation programme for Georgia focuses on economic development in rural areas. Agriculture provides a living for 40% of the total workforce, but is not very productive, leading to a higher level of poverty in rural areas (27.5% rural vs. 17.1% urban). In a bid to boost productivity, the SDC supports the Georgian government’s efforts to improve the quality of vocational training in farming, ensuring that farmers acquire the necessary skills to be competitive. The project “Modernizing agricultural vocational education and training in Georgia” is implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) with an SDC contribution of CHF7 million ($7.5 million) from 2018-2022.