One hundred underfed cows

What we inherited at Moo Moo Farms in 2024, and what 600 cows looks like in 2025.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-04-23 · Ventures

When our group took over Moo Moo Farms in 2024, we inherited just over a hundred cows, and most of them were underfed.

The farm had been founded around 2015 as the first commercial dairy in Cambodia. The idea was right. The capital ran out before the execution caught up. The cows had been on a thin ration for months, production was a fraction of what the herd could have delivered, the infrastructure was tired and the team was tired with it.

Patrick took operations. I write the story, which is a sensible division of labour, because the story of a turnaround is always less interesting than the operations and Patrick is far too busy with the operations to romanticise them.

Year one was feed and bodies. A better ration, supplied consistently, and a slow rebuild of the herd. We did not buy our way out of it. We brought the animals we already had up to weight first, on the logic that a thin cow does not become productive by standing next to a hundred more thin cows.

By the end of 2025 we expect to be around 600 head, and about a thousand by the end of 2026. Those are the numbers investors ask for and they are fine numbers. They are not what I think about on a Tuesday.

What I think about on a Tuesday is whether the milk that leaves the farm at six in the morning is still at the right temperature when it reaches the Moo Moo Mart in Phnom Penh that afternoon. Cold chain. Easily the most boring phrase in dairy, and the one that decides whether a Cambodian family can buy fresh local milk for their child at the same price as imported powder reconstituted in a factory.

We are not building a dairy empire, whatever the deck says. We are building a national supply chain slowly, and it is measured in bodies and grass rather than quarters. If it works, a thousand cows by 2026 is the opening of a longer story about Cambodia growing its own food again. If it does not, we will have turned a hundred underfed cows into a thousand underfed cows, which would be a considerably more expensive way to be wrong.

So far the ration is holding.