Milk-and-Dairy-Products-in-Human-Nutrition-FAO

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Milk and dairy products in human nutrition
Box 8.1 (continued)
Dairying and the environment
• Dairying promotes integrated farming and optimizes use of local natural
resources, including locally generated fodder, feed and crop by-products for
feeding animals
• Smallholders are low energy users in the production of milk compared with
producers in the industrialized countries; even lower if the huge energy costs
associated with importing milk are taken into account, e.g. (i) for the energyintensive
process of drying liquid milk into milk powder in the exporting country,
(ii) for transporting the milk powder and (iii) for converting the milk powder
back in to liquid milk
• The manure produced by dairy animals belonging to smallholders can be used
up to three times in integrated farming practice: first to produce biogas for
cooking and lighting; second to fertilize fish ponds; third, as slurry recovered
from ponds, which is dried and used to fertilize soil
Mendefere Dairy Association, Eritrea
Brian Dugdill
Source: Dugdill, 2008.
8.2.1 Employment generation in milk production
About 12 to 14 percent of the world’s population, nearly a billion people derive at
least some part of their livelihood from livestock (Steinfeld et al., 2010). In 2005 the
World Bank Agricultural Investment Sourcebook (World Bank, 2005a) reported that
smallholder dairying was cost effective and a key source of nutrition and income
to 300 million farm families globally, including 40 million in India. Mean herd size
is around two cows, giving an average milk yield of 11 litres per farm per day and
creating one full-time on-farm job; in developed countries over five times that