From little, forward

“You can’t keep cows just for profit. You have to love the animal. You have to love the land. You have to love the work itself.”

With these words, 39-year-old Vitalie Vrabie sums up life as a small-scale dairy farmer in the Republic of Moldova. A former migrant worker who left for the Russian Federation at 16, Vitalie spent years cycling between work abroad and brief visits home – months away, a few weeks with the family, then back again.

“I watched other men from the village do the same thing their whole lives,” he says. “They come back at old age and tell me they missed everything. Their children grew up without them, and the regret stays with them. I didn’t want that to be my story.”

Starting from scratch

In 2018, with his wife Elena at home and three children growing up fast, Vitalie bought his first cow. He had no land, no equipment and no savings. He took out loans, borrowed from neighbours and relied on earnings his mother sent from Italy, where she had migrated for work.

“Practically everything you see here was built with my mother’s money from Italy,” he says, gesturing around the modest but meticulously kept farmstead.

Parcel by parcel, he accumulated six hectares of cropland. He bought a tractor, learned to grow triticale and corn for silage, and built up a small herd. People he had consulted warned him: “There is some profit in dairy, but you’ll never have a Saturday or a Sunday. No holidays.” He chose it anyway.

A helping hand through winter

Like much of the Republic of Moldova, Sângerei has been hit by recurring drought. In Vitalie’s village, the dairy herd has dropped from around 300 cows to roughly 160. Farmers without land of their own are the hardest hit: the cost of purchased feed can consume half their income, and many have been forced to sell their animals.

When asked to calculate his costs and profits, Vitalie smiles and shakes his head. “I don’t calculate that,” he admits. “If I did, I’d be tempted to sell the cows. So I don’t look too closely at the numbers. I just keep going.”

Through the joint FAO–UNDP project “Emergency support for agricultural producers in the context of the socioeconomic and energy crisis,” funded by Switzerland and Austria, Vitalie received a small but modern milking machine with a sanitary kit, and concentrated feed for his lactating cows. He was among 30 farmers from Farmer Field Schools – themselves an activity financed under the project, giving smallholders the opportunity to learn about sustainable agrifood production and animal care – in the northern districts who were the first to receive the new equipment.

Vitalie’s old milking machine had been rusting for years. The new one, with a 30-litre capacity, is faster and far more hygienic – critical for a family that processes and sells all its dairy directly to customers. “When you milk by hand, no matter how careful you are, impurities get in,” he explains. “The machine is clean. We strive for quality above all – and if we produce quality, we have clients. Sometimes we can’t even keep up with the demand.”

The concentrated feed, lasted through February 2025 and pushed the milk fat content from 3.8 percent to as high as 4.5 – a difference customers taste in every block of cheese. Crossing the 4 percent threshold also means a higher selling price, roughly 20 percent more per litre.  “Not only me,” Vitalie adds. “My colleagues in the Farmer Field School are all very satisfied.”

Before dawn, after dark

Vitalie’s alarm goes off at five in the morning. By half past he is in the barn – feeding, warming the equipment, milking. Then he drives to the Alexandreni town hall where he works as the commune’s electrician, and returns in the afternoon to feed the animals again. Elena, meanwhile, heads out to read water meters across the area.

Each cow has a name. Most are named after the day they were born: Miranda for Miercuri (Wednesday), Lola for Luni (Monday), Dumana for Duminică (Sunday), Sabrina for Sâmbătă (Saturday). Tina is the exception – named by his daughter. Four are milking cows; Sabrina, the youngest, is a promising heifer he is raising for her bloodline. “Her mother was small too, but she gave a lot of milk,” he says. “That’s why I’m keeping the daughter.”

On summer mornings the whole family – Vitalie, Elena, their eldest daughter now 18 and at university in Bălți, their young son, and the youngest – heads to the hillside pastures at six, each with a pitchfork, to harvest hay on slopes too steep for the tractor.

“The girls complain a little, but then they take photographs up on the hill and post them,” he laughs. “We are a united family, as they say.”

He also keeps four sheep, mainly for his mother in Italy. He makes cheese, packs it carefully and ships it to her abroad. “She’s getting older,” he says softly. “She loves sheep cheese. It would be a shame not to send it to her.”

Vitalie has had offers to leave abroad, where the wages are higher. He has turned them all down. “The money is less here, but I’m home with my children. I see them when they wake up, when they come back from school. That is a pride no salary can replace.”

The right support, at the right time

Vitalie dreams of expanding – but finding reliable help in a depopulating village is a challenge. “I want to grow,” he says, “but you can’t find people. They come, they work a winter, and in spring they’re gone.” He uses manure as fertilizer, practises crop rotation, and refuses to buy chemical inputs. He is self-sufficient in meat, dairy, eggs and most of his family’s food.

At 39, Vitalie is building something patient and rooted – an operation that may never make him wealthy, but that keeps his family fed, his mother connected and his children close. In Vitalie’s barn, the new machine hums each morning. The feed carried his herd through winter. These are not grand interventions – they are the kind of precise, practical support that keeps a small farmer from falling backward, and gives him the confidence to keep going forward.

Over 20 000 smallholder farmers and vulnerable households across the Republic of Moldova received critical inputs – seeds, fertilizers, equipment – through the FAO–UNDP project, funded by Switzerland and Austria in the period of 2022–2025. Eighty modern milking machines, procured from Switzerland funding, went to small dairy households - 50 of them to women, who across rural Republic of Moldova carry much of the daily burden of animal care and milking.