 You are a small dairy farmer. You want to produce and sell milk, but you face a whole lot of hurdles. Your animals are short of feed, especially in the dry season. Your cows don't produce a lot of milk, so you don't have much to sell. And even if you did, who would you sell it to? The work is hard. Often, young people have left for the city. You cannot solve these problems by yourself. You need to work with other people. To feed your cows better, you need to plan better fodder crops, and you will need the right seat and other advice. It's an idea to organize a group of dairy farmers to produce milk, keep it cool, and arrange with a trader or collector to pick it up every day. You might need a loan from a bank, and you need some training on what to do. That's all a bit much for one farmer to organize. That is where an innovation platform can help. An innovation platform is a group of people who are interested in the same thing. In this case, milk. Each person brings their own skills and ideas to identify the common problems and find ways of solving them. The International Livestock Research Institute has been helping dairy farmers in Uttarakhand in India and Moragaru and Tanga districts in Tanzania. The Milk It Project set up innovation platforms to address dairy issues in these areas. Each platform included stakeholders in the dairy value chain. Farmers, extension workers, traders, processors, researchers, the local government, and banks. The platform members discussed the problems and they came up with solutions. The problems depended on the particular location. In India, for example, feed is short in summer. Farmers spread what feed they have on the ground and the animals trample on it. So a lot goes to waste. The innovation platform in India introduced a cheap type of feed trough. It found some financial support to help the farmers build their own troughs. The innovation platform also found cheap choppers that women could use to cut the fodder. A local manufacturer started making and selling the choppers. The platform introduced several other changes. Better breeds of animals that could produce more milk, fodder grasses, and dual-purpose crops that produce more fodder. Vaccination against food and mouth disease. It set up self-help groups that worked with the marketing cooperative. Now the farmers can sell their milk in town for a better price. In Tanzania, as you might expect, the problems were different. If the Tanzanian farmers planted fodder grasses, other livestock keepers would come and graze their cattle there. So the innovation platform got the local leaders to agree on who could use what land. Farmers who wanted to plant fodder could fence off a piece of land. The village agreed to set aside a whole area to use as a feed reserve in the dry season. They even got in touch with an NGO to improve the supply of drinking water. So local platforms are good for identifying and finding solutions to local problems. But how about the bigger picture? In Tanzania, the project helped set up a network of innovation platforms. Village-level groups consisted mainly of producers and local traders. Regional level platforms in Tanga and Moragoro included district policy makers, input providers, researchers, milk processors and the local radio station. A national platform called the Diary Development Forum includes senior policy makers as well as representatives of producers, processors and other stakeholders. Information flows both ways, from the local platforms up to the national level and from the national back down to the local. Innovation platforms are having a big effect on dairying in some parts of India and Tanzania. Farmers now have more feed and they are wasting less. They are animals are more productive, they are producing and selling more milk, they have better links to other people in the value chain and to the services they need. They are getting better prices because they work together. Processors are also happy because they are getting the regular supplies of milk they need to satisfy their customers. Rather than waiting for the research and extension system to deliver a technology that might not be useful, the farmers can now say what they want. Women can get their voices heard and can make sure the solutions are what they need. Innovation platforms are not a cure for everything but they are a very useful way to getting together with other farmers, meeting other types of people, identifying problems, finding solutions, guiding research and influencing policy.