The regional secretary for Agriculture and Forestry guaranteed today, in the island of Faial, that the Azorean agriculture followed, in the last years, “a way of great success”.

Speaking in the commemorations of the 65th anniversary of the Cooperativa Agrícola de Lacticínios do Faial (CALF), Noé Rodrigues added that this success, expressed in the today countless available infrastructures in the areas of the production and of the transformation, results also, in a large extent, of the “strategic directions that the Government defined for the sector”.
 
In this phase, the Azorean producers “will be able to reckon with a generous framework of financial incentives” to modernize their agricultural explorations, he suggested.

Noé Rodrigues still considered that, face to the set of budgetary and financial availabilities meantime guaranteed by the Region, “there is created the ideal scenery so that all of us, with competence, dedication and much work, can have more pride in this activity”, which importance is central for the Azores.

As for the CALF, which today unsealed a plate in honour of their founders, personified in the person of José da Rosa Aica, the regional secretary underlined that the cooperative already has, at present, “important part of its problems solved”.

He remembered that, while integrating the LactAçores, the cooperative gained a “bigger capacity and renown” at the level of the marketing of its products, being that, from the transformation point of view, it is endowed since 2004 with a “modern manufacturing unity and able to produce with quality”.

He still announced that the Government, together with the CALF and the two agricultural associations of the island, is already working in a project “to typify the dairy production of Faial and its products”.

As he explained, the project, which reckons with “competent external partnerships as there are the Estação Zootécnica Nacional and the Companhia das Lezírias”, aims at guaranteeing to these products from Faial “a differentiation” from their Azorean congeners, so as to turn them into added values that help to support the cattle activity in Faial.

With seat in the parish of Cedros, the CALF appeared in the sequence of the bankruptcy of the ancient Fábrica de Lacticínios Faial, Ltd., in 1940, dating from the 29th of October of 1943 the ministerial permit that approved its statutes, putting a final point in the process of constitution and legalization of this dairy products cooperative.

The cooperative has at the place of Cascalho, parish of Cedros, a modern manufacturing unity, inaugurated in 2004, where it labours annually nearly 13 million litres of milk, producing almost 1.400 tons of cheese and butter.

The CALF is one of three associates of the LactAçores, union of cooperatives, with particular emphasis in the component of the marketing of milk products, which integrates equally the Uniqueijo, of S. Jorge, and the Unileite, of S. Miguel.