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has spent his entire adult life in Asia. Eventually, he found himself based out of Hong Kong, running a technology company. When he decided to leave
the company, around 2012, they asked him if he would be willing to take over the only non-performing investment
he had made as director, the company’s subsidiary in Ulaanbaatar. Michael had been to Ulaanbaatar several times, over the years, and by 2014, he found himself running his own small company there.
Michael made a friend in Mongolia, named Tumurkhuyag, who was on the brink of bankruptcy. He had borrowed $15,000 from a bank, in the 1990s,
to start a small cheese company, and suddenly discovered he owed $60,000. Tumurkhuyag had originally taken the loan from a bank which collapsed; now, nearly two decades later, the state bank had contacted him to say that they had bought up the assets of the defunct bank, and that Tumurkhuyag’s debt was now owed to them, including about 20 years of interest payments.
Michael was so outraged that an honest person could be caught in such an odd mess of bureaucracy, that he became involved. He negotiated with the bank, saying that if they would forgo the interest payments, he would repay the $15,000 principal. In the end, Michael found himself a partner in a very small Mongolian cheese company, an industry he knew nothing about.
The “company” was a single building with a few vats and processing
machines, out in the countryside, 80 kilometres from Ulaanbaatar, where there was no market or distribution for the cheese they produced. “It was a place that was hard to find and hard to live,” remembered Michael. The remoteness of the location and the harshness of
the life, in a country where winter temperatures regularly drop to -40 Celsius made Michael respect the hard work Tumurkhuyag had already invested in the company. When he sampled the
project of the Przewalski's horse. The Dutch government was instrumental in helping to support the establishment of the park and over time has underwritten a number of its ecological initiatives.
Tumurkhuyag had been a hunter in the area as a young man, before becoming trained as an accountant. He knew the wildlife in the area and was given a
job with the park, helping to establish its boundaries. In addition to the
“He made a good quality cheese and showed me that you could do that without a big factory”
Tumurkhuyag showed how to make a good quality cheese without the need for a major plant.
cheese, Michael was impressed with how good it was, giving him hope that maybe the company could be expanded into something more profitable. “He made
a good quality cheese and showed me that you could do that without a big factory,” said Michael.
Cheese making as compensation
How Tumurkhuyag learned cheese making and how the art came to Mongolia in the first place relates to the Przewalski's horse which dates back to Genghis Khan. The Mongolians call the horse takhi,
a name of reverence, meaning “spirit.” As the only breed of horse that has never been broken, Smithsonian magazine calls the Przewalski's horse the last truly wild horse left on Earth.
The Przewalski’s horses nearly died out. European zoologists tried to conserve the animals, breeding them on preserves in various countries. At one point, there were as few as 12 breeding stock left.
By the 1990s, however, the breed had made a comeback, reaching close to 1,000 animals, protected in multiple countries, on more than one continent. At that point, the decision was taken to reintroduce the horses into the wild. Mongolia had just transitioned from being a Soviet satellite to a democracy, keen on cooperating with the West.
In 1993, the Mongolian government created Hustai National Park, about 80 km from Ulaanbaatar, as a Specially Protected Area for the reintroduction
Przewalski's horse, other protected species would find refuge there, including deer and elk.
Due to the establishment of the park, many local herders lost their grazing lands. “The Dutch, being Dutch, thought the best way to compensate people was to teach them how to make cheese,” said Michael, with a smile. “But almost all of them forgot every- thing they learned as fast as they learned it. The Dutch gave them some basic equip- ment, and they sold it. But Tumurkhuyag didn’t.” In the process, Tumurkhuyag “became the father of the concept of pasto- ral cheese in Mongolia”.
Overcoming challenges
Conducting research, Michael came across reports from foreign organisations, which said that dairy had no future in Mongolia. One issue is that, because of the extreme weather conditions, the win- dow of time, when milk can be collected, is extremely narrow. “But, I disagreed,” said Michael, defiantly. “Tumurkhuyag had managed to survive very far from
the city, with no natural distribution, and only one type of cheese. So, if you had 100 people, all around Mongolia, all mak- ing different kinds of cheese, and if they had a network to help...”
Tumurkhuyag’s little company could only make cheese in summer, and because he had no heating, he had to sell it before winter, or it would freeze. As the cheese plant was far from the city
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