HCMC – Vietnam Dairy Products Joint Stock Co. (Vinamilk) has broken ground for a high-tech dairy farming complex worth VND1.6 trillion in Yen Dinh District in the north-central province of Thanh Hoa.

The dairy farm covers an area of 2,500 hectares, including 147 hectares for the farm building and 1,600 hectares for material cultivation for cows, the local news site VnExpress reports.

The complex is designed by GEA Farm Technologies of the the United States and equipped with modern technology and machines automatically controled by computers via data transferred to the company’s headquarters in HCMC.

Vinamilk will import 16,000 cows from Australia and the U.S. for breeding at the farm in the first phase of the project and the herd could rise to 24,000 in the second phase. When in operation in 2017, the farm is expected to have an average milk production capacity of 98,630 kilograms a day, equivalent to over 36 million liters per year.

Vinamilk now has eight large-scale dairy farms with the entire cow herd imported from Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. In addition, the company is cooperating with nearly 8,000 dairy farming households and buy about 650 tons of fresh milk per day from their cows.

Vinamilk’s chief executive officer Mai Kieu Lien said the new dairy project will create jobs and steady incomes for local farmers, as well as help transfer dairy farming technology to Thanh Hoa and neighboring provinces. In addition, the project will also enable Vinamilk to realize the revenue target of US$3 billion by 2017 and become one of the world’s top 50 dairy companies.

Since 2015, Vinamilk has invested more than VND2.4 trillion in large-scale farms. The company’s target is to raise the total number of cows from 140,000 to 160,000 in 2020.

In the past five years, Vinamilk has posted average revenue growth of over 20% per year. In the first seven months of this year, Vinamilk reported around VND23 trillion in revenue, up nearly 17% year-on-year.