Last month, in Part 1 of the two-part account of my recent mission trip to Mongolia, I may have left you with a bad taste in your mind, as I recounted Mongolian hors d’oeurves I struggled to eat after a Sunday church service. I promise: no more mention of that here in Part 2.

I started my time in Mongolia in the capital city, Ulaanbaatar, after 26 hours in the air in four flights, with a layover in Beijing and 13 time zones.

Ulaanbaatar has a population of 1.3 million, scattered over 50 square miles. Compare that to Columbus, where 900,000 people live in 15 square miles. Mongolia has a country-wide total population of approximately three million.

Ulaanbaatar sits on high plains, surrounded by four mountain ranges and the Gobi Desert. Part of the Gobi Desert lies in southeast Mongolia, and the rest in China’s Inner Mongolia.

I could see no evidence of crop tillage – just desolate winter land sparsely covered by grass. Photos I was shown, however, indicated that the grass is very luxuriant in the summer when they get sunlight 20 hours a day, similar to Alaska. And it is hot! Not 24 below zero, like when I was there.

There are no fences, no boundaries, nor deeds to land ownership. Horses, cattle and sheep wander free range.

Major highways, with two lanes, are few and far apart. But those are well paved. This is more than I can say for secondary roads. Animals commonly roam for morsels of frozen, dormant grass, but I saw none that appeared to be starving. And though I noticed that many animals seemed comfortable nearing the berms of the highways, I saw no roadkill.

In the cities, Mongols live in apartment buildings up to 20 stories high – with elevators only in the tallest buildings. I stayed on the top floor of a six-floor building. I got a great workout, dragging my luggage up the 12 flights of stairs.

Despite it being -24° F outside, my apartment was warm, though the cold showers really got my circulation going (miraculously, hot water streamed from the shower head the last two days of my trip).

This was my first international mission trip. In my previous trips around the world, I have been retained as a consultant. And as paid consultant, especially in China, I was expected to start lecturing as soon as I exited the plane, got to my hotel and had a bite to eat. Never mind that I had crossed 13 time zones after 18 hours on a plane.

As I mentioned in last month’s column, I was hosted by the Christian Veterinary Mission (CVM), which operates in a number of indigent countries around the world. The veterinarians of CVM are committed to helping people achieve food security. And they share the word of Jesus Christ to those who are interested. My heart was warmed, because most are interested.

Mongolia is a Buddhist nation. The government allows CVM’s subsidiary, V.E.T. Net, to provide veterinarian services and a Christian message – for a daily fee paid to the government. Full-time resident CVM veterinarians also register with the government. Their fees are quite high.

Mongol veterinarians are very poorly trained, so V.E.T. Net provides a master’s program for Mongol vets who want to improve their veterinary skills.

V.E.T. Net also provides vaccines and medications at cost to local cooperating sheep veterinarians. With CVM’s support, V.E.T. Net has significant purchasing power. If a shepherd is unable to pay his veterinarian for medications, they are provided by V.E.T. Net at no cost. In return, the shepherd pledges to provide up to four sheep to V.E.T. Net as payment.

These sheep are given to indigent, food insecure families who complete V.E.T. Net training classes that cover all aspects of sheep management. V.E.T. Net gives three sheep to each graduating family. When I was in Mongolia the program distributed 1,200 head of sheep to indigent families! Now this would be a great idea for our local food pantry, the Wherehouse!

When I arrived in Ulaanbaatar I was given a couple of days to acclimate to my new surroundings. I attended morning devotions and a few introductory meetings and got settled before starting on my mission.

My mission was twofold:

• To offer input on designing a new large animal veterinary hospital. While Mongolia has a few small animal clinics, it appeared there were no large animal clinics.
• To assess dairy cattle management and dairy housing and recommend a plan for training dairy farmers on dairy cow management.

I came to understand the difficulty of my task when I visited the country’s modern dairy operations, called cluster dairies. The facilities were state-of- the-art, but they were staffed by people whose dairy management skills were at a grade school level.

In one case, seven 50-cow dairies had been constructed within a mile or so of each other – thus the term “cluster dairies.” Each dairy included an insulated free stall barn for the cows with an adjacent single-side, six-stall herringbone shaped parlor that was equipped with the latest automatic take-off milker units. The investor in the seven facilities had an agreement with seven Mongol dairy farmers and their families to manage each of the dairies.

The dairies’ cows were a French breed, Montbéliarde. They are brown and white, similar to Simmental cattle, and they tended to be heavy, as though they might be regarded as a dual-purpose breed. Their mammary development tended to confirm this conclusion.

Of all my observations at the Mongolian dairies, I was most concerned by a situation that American bovine nutritionists would call “empty feed bunk syndrome.” In the U.S., properly managed dairy cows are provided a precise well-balanced high energy/protein diet 24 hours a day to enable optimum milk production.

The diet of these Mongol cows, however, was very much lacking in comparison. They consumed all of their feed within a couple of hours of receiving it. In contrast, American cows are provided nutritional support around the clock. This includes a farm staff member turning their feed over every few hours to freshen the appearance and stir up the aroma to heighten the cows’ appetite.

And during my time in Mongolia, I saw firsthand that dairymen aren’t the only ones who need training. I saw a Mongol veterinarian, who was part of our tour group, examine the reproductive tract of a cow without sanitary prep. The cow had calved a day or so prior to our arrival and had not passed her fetal membranes after birthing.

After a long day of visiting dairies, we headed back to Ulaanbaatar. Probably the most memorable sight of my visit appeared on the horizon – a 300-foot tall statue of Genghis Khan riding his steed, both in full armament for battle. The copper and brass monument gleamed in the late afternoon sun with the majesty of our Statue of Liberty.

Even though Genghis Khan was considered a barbarian by his enemies, he was a great leader. He rose up from the lowest caste, and when he came to power, he freed all of the slaves in each country that was captured, promoted freedom of religion, established local government rule leaving the local officials in charge and developed trade routes, the “Silk Road,” to the Orient and across Europe and Asia.

His family formed the longest dynasty in history, from 1105 AD to 1924, when the Russian Bolsheviks captured Mongolia and transformed it into a communist Soviet satellite. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Mongolia returned to democracy, although Mongols have since been struggling with government corruption. But aren’t we all?