8 July 2022
Desa Dairy Farm is a popular destination for leisure travellers to Kota Kinabalu city. Desa Dairy Farm is often dubbed as "The Little New Zealand" of Sabah as it offers scenic views of cattle herds with the mountains as the backdrop. Located in Kundasang which is about a 2 hours drive from the city, many would make a day trip to Kundasang, with Desa Dairy Farm as one of the featured destination.
For us, Desa Farm is the first destination on the second day of our 2D/1N trip to Kundasang. From the Kinabalu Pine Resort where we stayed overnight, the farm was only a short 20 minutes drive away.
Entrance fees for visitors are paid at the gate upon arrival and our driver/guide took care of this. We could see that this is a very popular attraction in Kundasang. The car park was practically full when we arrived at slightly past 9 AM. And it is not a small car park. Our driver/guide dropped us off at the entrance and told us to call him once we are done with the visit while he waited for a parking space.
View of the farm with Mount Kinabalu in the background.
Like all visitors, we went to the main building that was facing the car park. The milk processing plant is located in the main building. Here we could look through the glass window and see the milking pens below us.
Empty milking pens as seen from the main building.
Raw milk processing happens from 10 AM to 3 PM on every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. We visited on a Friday, so there was no activity, just empty pens.
The next best thing to do was the taste some of the farm’s products, in particular the yogurt ice-cream. Two flavors are sold in the main building - chocolate or vanilla, with a selection of chocolate chips toppings.
With yogurt ice cream in hand, we went to check out the rest of the farm. Most of the cattle are on the pasture far away and the closest cow we saw was about 50 meters away, next to the main building.
The farm covers more than 200 hectares and produces fresh milk and cheese from its herd of black and white cows.
The black and white cattle are Holstein Friesian breed, the world’s highest-production dairy cattle.
I managed to get a vantage point and shoot some photos of the distant herd using the basic zoom function of my Canon G5X.
We tried going to the cow barn next but it was fenced off with a sign warning about bio-hazard.
Zoomed in view of the cow barn that we could not go to.
There was also supposed to be activities for visitors such as feeding of calves. No go! Looks like some disease control measures were being taken during this period.
You cannot get close to the cattle, nor
bottle feed the calves!
That was our experience when we visited.
There really isn’t much to do here really, except eat some gelato and snap some photos of the cows with the awesome scenery. We accomplished all this within 45 minutes!
Quite a disappointment for this supposedly "The Little New Zealand" of Sabah.
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