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Dear Iowa farmers!

Heartfelt greetings from the AKKOR Moscow office and from all private and family farmers of Russia!

You may ask WHY a chicken dish to open this last letter of 2016? Because the next year 2017 will be the Year of the Red Rooster (for those who believe in different world traditions!). So, many families will make a dish to welcome the New Year 2017 and if you have a farm, maybe a rooster will be the center dish!

 But before New Year comes, you will welcome Christmas. Merry Christmas to all of you who are reading this letter and to your family members too! In Russia we are two weeks behind in our religious calendar, so we’ll have to wait till January 7, 2017 to celebrate ours.

What was the passing year like? It was good for most, extraordinary good for some and challenging for others. Like life itself.

We would like to share two pieces of news with you in this letter.

The first comes from the AKKOR Milk Club. Dairy is one of the key components in our “food basket”. So, we try to share best practices with as many dairy farmers as possible.

We learned that conducting seminars in different regions of Russia serve our members the best. Last summer we had one in central Russia, not far from Moscow. This December the AKKOR Milk Club held its seminar in Siberia, in the Novosibirsk Region.

It was a very representative gathering of dairy farmers from the whole Eastern Siberia area: from a permafrost Republic of Yakutia to the Baikal and the Krasnoyarsk territories. AKKOR was represented by Deputy Executive Director, Olga Bashmachnikova whom many of you know.