Day 2 - Malayan Flour Mill, Lumut

It was a long day yesterday after seeing the sites and bars of KL on Wednesday night. We got on a bus to Lumut at 7am and arrived back at 11pm last night. Lumut, approximately 4 hrs drive north west of KL is home to Malayan Flour Mill and their subsidiary integrated poultry enterprise Dindings Poultry Integration. Yesterday's trip report was by Jim Heal from Three Springs.......

Take home points I would like to share with other WA farmers:
- Many of the businesses in SE Asia use a value adding or integrated approach. For example Malayan Flour Mills not only make flour but also feed pellets, which then then use in there 'day old chick' production, broiler farm and they then process the broiler meat for market.
- Malayan Flour Mills have access to very cheap labour. We spoke to one of the operational staff in the feed mill and they said they earn the equivalent of AUD1.880/hr and work for 28 days straight and then get 2 days off and each year they get 18 days annual leave.
- The Dindings Hatchery produces 2.5M chicks per cycle and each cycle takes 60 days. The broiler farms produce chickens that go to processing at approximately 2kg which take roughly 35 days. For each kg of meat produced it they use 1.6kg of feed.
- All four flour mills owned by MFM produce 45,000 tonne of flour/month.

Interesting facts:
- on average Malaysians eat 35kg of chicken/ person/ year and consume 35kg of flour. In Indonesia they consume 18kg of flour/person / year, growing at a rate of 7-8% and in Vietnam 12kg/person/year.
- 1.4M tonne of wheat is imported from Australia into Malaysia every year.
- In Malaysia there is a call to prayer every Day at dawn and dusk as part of the Muslim religion.
- The KL Tower where we had dinner on Wednesday night is 421m high.