We will just turn up the cows

A minister asked us for more milk. Two hundred cows from Vietnam then stood at the border for a week while somebody waited to be paid.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-08-23 · Ventures

The Minister of Agriculture invited us in and put the problem on the table plainly. Cambodia does not produce enough milk. Most of what people drink here arrives as powder from somewhere else and gets reconstituted in a factory. He wanted local fresh milk, at volume, and he was asking the people already in the business to go and make it.

Patrick said we would just turn the cows up. He meant it as a joke, the way you would say we will crank the dial. Several people around the table nodded and said yes, yes. For a second it was policy.

What turning up the cows actually means is buying cows. There is no dial. The herd grows by animals arriving on a truck, and every animal has papers. The minister said he would help with the permits and the paperwork, and he did.

Our first move was about two hundred head from Vietnam. They cleared the Vietnamese side. On the Cambodian side the head of customs wanted more money than the paperwork said, which is the oldest sentence in this region and still somehow a surprise every time.

Ang said no. Not a negotiation, not a slow no, just no.

Then the arithmetic of that no arrived. Two hundred dairy cows do not wait politely. They are lactating. If nobody milks them they get mastitis, then they get sick, then you lose the animal, and every one of them is money already spent. So for over a week we sent our own people to the border to milk them by hand and keep them fed and watered in the heat, twice a day, while a stack of paper sat on a desk. Millions of dollars in animals standing on the wrong side of a line, being kept alive by staff who should have been at the farm.

Eventually Ang called the minister. He put it about as directly as it can be put. You asked me for help. I helped you. Now you help me.

The minister drove to the border. From what came back to us, he did not shout and he did not threaten anyone's job. He explained the bureaucracy to the man, which was the point. I cannot fire you. I can transfer you. There is a posting at the Thai border, which was being shelled at the time.

The man nodded and signed immediately.

Everybody enjoys that ending, and I enjoy it too. It is worth saying what is underneath it. Nothing about the rules changed that afternoon. The cows had always been legal, the papers had always been in order, and the only variable was whether somebody with more weight than the customs officer was willing to spend an afternoon on our problem. We happened to have that person's number because a minister had invited us to a meeting about milk.

Which is also the answer to why the country is short of milk. It is not a shortage of grass or of people who want to farm. It is that a shipment can sit at a border for a week because one man wants an envelope, and the fix is not a rule, it is a phone call. Most businesses do not get the phone call. They pay, quietly, and the cost lands in the price of the milk, and then somebody writes an article about why local dairy cannot compete with imported powder.

We paid nothing and it cost us a week of hand milking in the sun. I would take that trade again. I would also rather not be asked to.