PAA-Leite: Operational Management for Ceará's Milk Program

PAA Leite (Food Acquisition Program, Incentive for Milk Production and Consumption modality) is a public policy that buys milk from small family-farming producers and distributes it for free to families in social vulnerability. In Ceará, the program is operated by the State Agrarian Development Secretariat (SDA), which has to sustain both ends of the policy in the same system: who produces the milk and who receives it.

System modules

• Administration — producer, beneficiary, dairy plant and entity representative registration
• Registrations — links and supporting data for the program's flow
• Tank Monitoring — cooling tanks linked to each dairy plant
• Expression of Interest — new producers and dairy plants joining the program
• Documents and Reports — Excel and PDF export for accountability

Administration module: producer, beneficiary, dairy plant and entity representative registration

No producer enters the payment flow without validation. The Validate Producer screen cross-checks the registration against the DAP number (Family Farming Aptitude Declaration), its expiry date and the status with Adagri, and also lets staff cancel a fortnightly cycle or fix invoice data when documentation shows an inconsistency. It's this validated registration — not a simple list of names — that authorizes a producer to deliver milk to a partner dairy plant.

Producer Validation: DAP status, Pronaf type and validation status per municipality

Alongside the producer registry, the system keeps a separate beneficiary registry — the families who receive the milk distributed by the program — with civil records (ID document, voter registration, place of birth) and eligibility criteria for other social programs, such as Mais Infância Ceará. It's a completely different data and validation profile from the producer's, which is why it lives in its own dedicated registration module rather than as a variation of the producer registry.

Beneficiary Registration: civil records and ID document, validated in required fields distinct from the producer registry

CPF, RG and other identifiers shown in this case study's images were blurred to protect the privacy of the program's producers and beneficiaries.

PAA-Leite's operational core runs in fortnightly cycles: each validated producer delivers their milk to a cooling tank linked to a partner dairy plant, and the system logs that delivery by type (bovine or goat milk), tying it to the current cycle. It's this record — not an estimate — that moves the producer's status to Payment Generated, closing the loop between actual production and pay.

Dairy Plant Intake: each delivery links producer, milk type and payment status to the fortnightly cycle

From the recorded intakes, the Stock Report by Dairy Plant consolidates, per plant and per milk specification, the available volume — the view the Secretariat uses to track which plants are receiving production and which need attention. It's a simple operational report on the surface, but one that only exists because every individual intake was correctly linked to a validated producer and a registered dairy plant.

Stock Report by Dairy Plant: volume consolidated per plant and specification (bovine/goat)

PAA-Leite follows the same infrastructure pattern as SDA's other systems: a .NET/C# core holds the producer and beneficiary validation rules, while the operational panels for registration, tank monitoring and reporting are generated in PHP via Scriptcase, with grid screens, filters, sorting and Excel/PDF export ready for the Secretariat teams' daily use. An Angular layer covers more specific expression-of-interest and document flows. The whole application runs containerized with Docker and is version-controlled via Git.

Data model and traceability

The model revolves around the dairy plant as an aggregator: each partner plant gathers its tanks, its staff and the producers who deliver there. Every milk intake is born tied to that chain, letting the system answer, for any payment, exactly whose milk it was, in which tank, under which dairy plant's responsibility and in which cycle — the traceability a public producer-payment policy demands.

Dairy Plant Staff: part of the dairy plant → tanks → staff → producers chain

Across 9 months in production, PAA-Leite came to sustain over 5,000 milk-delivery records per fortnightly cycle, spread across dozens of partner dairy plants, each with its own producers, tanks and staff registered in the system. It's the system that guarantees a family-farming producer only gets paid when milk was actually delivered and validated — and that the milk distributed to beneficiary families has traceable origin, from a producer's first registration through to each dairy plant's stock report.