Māris Liopa, Chairman of the Forest Certification Council of Latvia (LMSP), and Pauls Rēvelis, editor of zemeunvalsts.lv, speak with Gundars Sisenis, Chairman of the Board of ELPA.

How is the dairy company operating during this time of various restrictions?

It is quite difficult and varied. A situation has developed during the company's operation, specifically that among our clients are many budget-funded institutions; for instance, we collaborate with catering companies that provide meals for schoolchildren and kindergarten children. This business niche is excellent in 'normal times', but... during Covid-19, it has turned its other cheek. As time passed and our clientele stabilised, everything ran clearly and logically: one heard nothing of state or municipal bankruptcies; people need to eat, the work would be there. At the moment, as I said, the situation is upside down. We took our first hit last year when everything was suddenly closed, and some of our production was even returned to us. If 35% of total turnover is made up of public procurement orders and they 'stop'... It is not easy.

We turned to the bank, which first suggested laying off some employees. Then we turned to 'Altum', obtained working capital, and received a small compensation from the Rural Support Service. The summer was successful again, we 'filled' the financial hole created in the spring, everything was fine in September, and... the next hit. Understandably, we are looking for solutions and are not giving up. We have opened our own online store; I must say, it is not easy to compete with the online stores of 'Maxima' or 'Rimi', but we are working on it. Even in this regard, there are still a number of bureaucratic processes that prevent us from starting quickly; a month was spent sorting out various processes. I will not talk much about state support, but... one of the government's recent decisions regarding the 25 m2 restriction caused us problems at our points of sale in Liepāja, at the Pēteris Market, and in Riga, at the Imanta Market – in the first week after the introduction of the restrictions, turnover fell by 50%. People cannot get to the retail outlet; not everyone wants to wait in line and freeze. I will say – it is one thing to invent and write something, another to understand and look at what is happening and how what is written works. I will not be original – we are told that it is much healthier in a Riga trolleybus and bus than at the Liepāja market. Is it really?

We have not laid off any employees, because we have trained everyone here on site; about 2/3 of our employees have been working for us for 10 years or more. As is the case in a small company, for example, there is one master who is responsible for making cottage cheese or cheese, and a team works together with this master, with each member having defined and known functions. The result is directly dependent on the work of each team member. If someone messes up, the cottage cheese or milk will not be usable or will taste different. We have a little more than 40 employees; in the production facility, everyone is local – from Kazdanga and Aizpute; we also have sales clerks in Saldus, Liepāja, and Riga.

We purchase raw materials from local farmers in the Aizpute and Kuldīga municipalities, as well as from cooperatives. Since we operate in the 'School Milk' programme, in the 'good times' when everyone was studying, we packaged up to 14,000 packs (250 ml) per day. We also deliver milk to schools and kindergartens in Riga. Yes, except for kindergartens, everything else is currently 'at a standstill'!

What I have observed: during the time of Covid-19, due to safety requirements, the volume of so-called secondary packaging has increased. If a product was once sold loose or in bulk, and you could scoop as much as you needed with a spatula, now it is wrapped in film or paper. The packaging industry is provided with work and is not complaining.

The first municipal elections following the administrative-territorial reform are approaching. How do they view the emerging large South Kurzeme municipality in Aizpute municipality, Kazdanga parish, where you will have to live, work, and cooperate?

The question about the administrative-territorial reform is simple: how to organise each municipality so that the people living there receive both information and services, and their accessibility is not hampered. We can wonder and discuss, but we have currently returned to the layout that we once called the Liepāja district. Perhaps the most serious mistake was the previous reform, when the large district split: two larger municipalities (Grobiņa and Aizpute), the slightly smaller Priekule municipality, and a series of ethnic municipalities – Nīca, Rucava, the Lithuanian border area – Vaiņode, the port city – Pāvilosta... The Aizpute municipality is relatively compact; a large part of the municipality's parishes border the centre, the town of Aizpute. In the large South Kurzeme municipality, we will be on one of its edges; our advantage is that we are closer to Riga. Historically, it might have been more correct to give the municipality the name Lejaskurzeme (Lower Kurzeme).

The municipality is built around Liepāja, and the municipality does not need the city, nor does the city need the municipality; Liepāja has its own issues to solve. The centre of the municipality will be in Grobiņa, although there are two cities that are equivalent in every respect – Grobiņa and Aizpute. Grobiņa, excuse me, is a dormitory suburb of Liepāja, which might eventually merge into one city in the distant future. But, as I said, the administrative and development centre of the municipality – as the decision provides – will be in Grobiņa, the reason for which is the location of various state services in nearby Liepāja. Aizpute claims to be a development centre; there has been talk of leaving some institutions with us and in Priekule as well.

Unified citizen service centres must certainly be preserved locally. It is important that there are no peripheries in the new municipality, neither in a geographical nor a developmental sense.

In the Aizpute municipality, there are two cultural and historical centres that I think will remain and will not perish – Kazdanga and Cīrava. By the way, all Latvian fish farmers with secondary vocational education have come from Kazdanga! We have a school and a kindergarten, which they are preparing to expand. At the moment, in South Kurzeme, we are the last of the Mohicans in the field of dairy processing... There is a small but good bakery in Priekule.

How did the dairy processing company form in Kazdanga? One has heard more about the Kazdanga Technical School.

If we look historically, the dairy processing plant in Kazdanga was created in a 'void'; there were no local dairy farming traditions. At the time, I worked in education myself, managed the Kazdanga Technical School; by education, I am a philologist, a Latvian language and literature teacher, having graduated from the Liepāja Pedagogical Institute. Life forced me to change occupations. The technical school once had 7,000 ha of land and more than 600 dairy cows. As a result of land reform in the 90s, people began to claim and reclaim land, but... where would you put the cows? There was no room for them. The technical school was left with about 1,000 ha of land and cows with excellent pedigrees. My hands would not let me tear anything down or liquidate...

The former USSR people's deputy, Kazdanga graduate Juris Janeks, and other Kazdanga Technical School graduates helped. By the way, Kazdanga graduates had an understanding of farming. What happens if you give a person 40 ha of land, but they have the mindset of a 1/2 ha owner? In those times (the 90s), the land was sold, often to foreigners, a good car was bought, the purchase was 'marked' (toasted), they drove into a tree, it was lucky they were still alive, but... well, neither land, nor money, nor a car! That was the not-so-distant past! Now, more than one former landowner works on the farm of the land purchaser...

Yes, we understood that a processing company was necessary during the time of change. The government of North Rhine-Westphalia from Germany 'threw' us an opportunity. We got equipment that was about 20 or more years old. Latvians have a saying about looking a gift horse in the mouth... We started work. Milk, cream, cottage cheese, in open form – the first things necessary for the table. We took the finished product to the market; I sold it myself, too. That was a good school, delving into the nuances and traditions of the market. I could not understand how a saleswoman with inferior goods was doing well, while we were doing worse with good ones. Where did the problem lie? We realised: our stall needed to have one person with sales talent and the ability to talk and 'close the sale'. At a social event, we met a saleswoman who worked at another stall and chatted. How much does your master pay you? So and so, regardless of what is sold. Come to us, we will pay more, and in addition, you will receive a percentage of what is sold! That is how we got our first decent sales clerk.

Then we started thinking about professional packaging of products. At that time, the experienced dairyman Mārtiņš Sesks was working in Riga. He promised to help, because at that time a new type of packaging was 'entering' Latvia; Mārtiņš had many blanks in the warehouse. We got those blanks, but... we had to think about how to seal them – you wouldn't sell milk or kefir in open cartons. My cousin, Ilmārs Sisenis, the father of the current LLU MF dean, a man with a distinctly technical mindset, came to our aid: we agreed that he would think and work on it. At that time, the construction bureau of 'Liepājas Metalurgs' was operating in Liepāja, which was ready to create a device, but... it would cost 5-7 thousand Lats. Where to get such money? It was good that the aforementioned cousin stepped forward, who had devised both the device and the algorithm; we just needed an employee with nimble hands and the ability to count. When I visited Mārtiņš Sesks in Riga again after some time, he was very surprised – what, you are using the blanks and asking for more? He had thought I had given up. I ordered carton blanks several more times, and one day, while driving to Liepāja, Mārtiņš arrived to see how the 'carton maker' was working. He was very surprised! We agreed that we could find a way to get a used packaging machine. For the first few years, we invested everything we earned into development.

How was the company name ELPA created?

At the time when I worked at the Kazdanga Technical School, the scientist Ilmārs Heinackis was active in the Liepāja district, who taught how to farm ecologically, correctly, etc., to use decomposed manure, not to use pesticides: biodynamic agriculture. The Association of Ecological Agriculture Processors (ELPA) was formed, in which technical school teachers and farmers were involved. In 2004, we were informed: if we use the word ecology in the name, it is necessary to certify the product. Good! We realised that it was not in vain. Yes, it would cost about 200 German marks per hour. Ouch! We didn't have that kind of money!

That is how ELPA was born. We have kept the philosophy to this day – a product as natural as possible; we do not use preservatives, we do not use stabilisers, we do not use vegetable fats. Our milk is not meant for 8-month storage. Plus – people know how we work and what we do; excursionists come and look. Minus – I cannot provide long storage and shelf-life terms. If we talk about export – it is what it is! We have received offers, but basically, we orient ourselves to the Latvian market. It was an interesting time and story about it – as is known, many Volga Germans live in Germany; they have shops in Berlin, etc. One of them had come into our shop and concluded that he remembered such cottage cheese as ours well. Nostalgia, good memories. He found me; we used the opportunity to freeze and export low-fat cottage cheese. That was a time when we also worked a little in Germany, but we were 'eaten out' of the market by the Poles due to volume.

Not so long ago, we started producing fresh cheese, which does not require a lot of work or large investments. We purchase dill from the Aizpute nursery and freeze it, caraway seeds are supplied by farms in the Lithuanian border area, but the vegetable mix (parsley, celery) must be taken from abroad because we have not found suppliers in Latvia.

In 2020, a person came to me, praising the yoghurt we produce. The yoghurt supposedly has ideal protein and carbohydrate ratios, such as no one else has; he had examined shelf after shelf in stores himself. Good, but what about it? The person offered to send a study that confirms this best protein and carbohydrate ratio (4:1). If sports drinks have such a ratio, it is good for exercising. There are problems with what the youth who exercise eat; does it affect (it probably does) the results... Cola, chips, pastries... A conversation is a conversation. At the beginning of January, we started producing a new product.

Interest in history

Latvia is undoubtedly my fatherland, but I was born in a village in the Omsk region Чёрный куст. We returned home from deportation in 1956; we were not allowed to return to our former place of residence. I remember my grandfather mowing sedge so that he could make us mattresses for sleeping. By the way, a very comfortable, soft, and modern material.

In 1992, when we could recover properties, the buildings were no longer there. At one time, Hutsul guest workers were accommodated in my family's property. Winters are cold in Latvia, one needs to heat. Provide firewood? Why? Wood is used in many places in the buildings; take a saw, saw off a piece, until one day the building collapses... We only recovered the land.

Last year, I participated in the filming of a movie about the 10th Aizpute Infantry Regiment, in which both of my grandfathers (Andrejs Sisenis and Mārtiņš Gūtmanis) had served, while still 'not knowing about the upcoming kinship'. Looking through the archive left by my mother, I found a photograph on the back of which they both signed as well.
Photographs by Gundars Sisenis and zemeunvalsts.lv have been used.
In the photographs below:
1. From Siberia
2. The cooperation with the Volga Germans mentioned in the interview. Cottage cheese packaging
3. The new product for exercising mentioned in the interview
4. Photo with both of Gundars Sisenis' grandfathers (mentioned in the last paragraph)