A teenager looks at a cow in a dairy farm in Shaoyang, Central China's Hunan Province. Photo: IC

 The human resources department of Ningbo Dairy Group has been flooded with applicant resumes since it placed a job posting on its official Sina Weibo account on August 2.

"We've received hundreds of resumes so far, but there are only two vacancies available," a human resource staff with the dairy group, who did not give his name, told the Global Times Wednesday.

The company offers an annual salary of 350,000 yuan ($57,155) for a cattle feeding job in Australia. Along with the job description, a few photos attached show the working conditions: a fine villa for accommodation, grasslands under the clear sky and some modern facilities.

Candidates should be aged between 23 and 35, have a bachelor's degree ­majoring in livestock feeding or animal science, and should have passed the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) test.

The recruitment ad has been widely circulated on the Internet. Some hailed it as a dream job, as data from job website zhaopin.com showed the average annual salary for this year's fresh graduates in Beijing is only 57,000 yuan. Some others doubted the credibility of the ad.

But the company refuted claims it is using the recruitment as a means of promoting their dairy products for free.

"Our group launched a subsidiary in Australia last December, and we need skilled talents there," the staff member said.

According to him, the successful candidates will first do an internship at the group's dairy farm in Cixi, East China's Zhejiang Province, and then go to work in Australia after they get the work permit.

Foreign cows

Ningbo Dairy Group has invested more than 100 million yuan in the Australian subsidiary, which owns about 2,000 dairy cattle. These heifers will be raised in Australia, and then exported to China.

According to the group's plan, 500 dairy cows will be shipped to China every year, providing milk to consumers in Ningbo, East China's Zhejiang Province.

China's imports of dairy cows have increased significantly in the past few years, surging to 128,000 in 2012 from 15,000 in 2008, as an effort to revamp the country's dairy industry following the melamine-tainted milk scandal in 2008, Great Wall Securities said in a research note published in April.

Domestic dairy companies have started to build their own farms after the scandal, and they have become major buyers of foreign dairy cows, the note said.

Currently, China only allows imports of dairy cattle from three countries - Australia, New Zealand and Uruguay. China used to import from the US, but have not done so since 2003 because of fears over the mad cow disease.

However, China's imports of dairy cattle have slowed down this year, with 29,980 dairy cows shipped in the first five months of 2013, down from 42,465 ones shipped during the same period last year, according to latest data from Chinese customs.

"Dairy companies have scaled back plans to build large-scale dairy farms with more than 10,000 cows, due to emerging problems such as losses, environmental pollution and lack of talents, which has led to a drop in dairy cattle imports," Song Liang, a dairy industry analyst with the Distribution Productivity Promotion Center of China Commerce, told the Global Times Thursday.

Robust imports in previous years have pushed up prices of imported dairy cows and forage, squeezing profit margins of domestic dairy farm operators, Song said.

The drop of China's dairy cattle imports this year was also because of limited supply from Australia and New Zealand, Chen Lianfang, an analyst with Beijing Orient Agribusiness Consultant, told the Global Times Wednesday.

"The demand for Australia and New Zealand-made dairy products is high, so these countries do not need to export dairy cows," Chen said.

Chinese customs data show that China imported 371,000 tons of milk powder from New Zealand in the first half of this year, up 34.3 percent from a year earlier.

Analysts expect China's imports of dairy cattle to rebound in the future, given a batch of dairy farms under construction.

A 450-million-yuan dairy farm is under construction in Jinhe township, North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, which could contain 11,000 dairy cows, and the project is expected to be finished by year-end.

There are more than 40 dairy farms with a size of 10,000 dairy cows currently under construction in China, and the largest one could accommodate about 40,000 cows, Century Weekly reported in December.

Milk shortage

Due to China's growing consumption of dairy products, low yields of homegrown dairy cattle, and dairy farmers' exit from the industry because of low gains, the country is expected to face a 9.02-million-ton supply shortage of raw milk in 2013, China International Capital Corp estimated in a research note published on April 8.

The average annual yield of dairy cows in China was 5.4 tons per cattle in 2012, still low compared to 9-10 tons per cattle in developed countries, the report said.

But analysts said China could not depend on cattle imports to solve its milk shortage.

"Imported dairy cows' annual yields in domestic dairy farms now can stay between 6-10 tons. But they only account for a small proportion of China's total dairy cows, which amounted to 14.4 million according to the Ministry of Agriculture," Song said.

Also, cattle imports do not necessarily lead to higher dairy output or high-quality dairy products which also depend on feed stuff, raising methods and the environment, according to Chen.

The fundamental problem of the domestic dairy industry is the environmental problem, Chong Quan, deputy international trade representative at the Ministry of Commerce, said at a group discussion during the country's "two sessions" held in March.

"Some imported dairy cattle catch cold when they arrive at the port in Shanghai. When they are sent to dairy farms, they need to be treated with antibiotic. In provinces such as North China's Hebei and Northwest China's Shaanxi that are suitable for developing dairy farming, the water pollution there is serious," he said.