Can Farmers' Wives Adopt New Technology? Case: Milk Processing during the Covid-19 Pandemic in the Tahunan Village, Pacitan Regency, Indonesia

This paper draws from our experience in assisting the midwives of milk farmers in learning how to process milk to raise their family income. We focus on 136 housewives of dairy farmers (all members of dairy farmer groups) in Tahunan village, Tegalombo sub-regency, Pacitan regency in Indonesia. There is only one collector in the area, PT DAS, sub-contracting from Nestle Indonesia. The problem happened when there is an over-supply, and the milk collector refuses to process the farmer's milk. For this reason, we have been assisting the dairy farm wives to process the milk and sell it to the local market since 2018. We start with the introduction of the plan to all dairy farm members (both the husband and the wives), then survey the availability of time the wives have. We focus on the wives because the husband is responsible for taking care of the cows. Also, we investigate the potential of local products (empon-empon, traditional roots such as ginger, turmeric) that can be processed together with the milk. The local product is chosen because of the familiarity of the potential customer with the flavor of the product. Introduction of the new technology to process milk at the beginning and the accompaniment are the keys to the acceptance of the activities.