Why is Milk Production and its further processing craftmanship an important topic for "The Knowledge"?
1. Milk Production takes raw plant material, which is not digestible for humans and transformes it to high-value proteine and fat nutrition ressources for a relevant part of mankind, specially in areas which are not possible to plow for field crops (erosion vulnerable soils at coasts, dry stormy grasslands or mountain sides).
2. Milk Production has a strong influence on wide landscapes with positive and negative side-effects.
Therefore it is important to handle dairy stocks and the belonging technical methods with responsibility on a high expert level.
3. Milk Production has a history over about 10.000 years as we know today.
It has created holistic biotops with various local animal races and specific dairy cultures over most different climate and vegetation zones.
4. Modern dairy industry provides nutrition and income for several millions of people, but is vulnerable by technical, biological and ecological problems.
The important role dairy industry plays in the worldwide economy is here perfectly described by H. Schelhaas, i hope he will accept i set a link here to his text:
"The dairy industry in a changing world": https://www.ilri.org/InfoServ/Webpub/fu ... chap1.html
5. Because modern dairy industry is extremely competitive, driven mostly by profit, it is on the way to destroy its genetic, biologic, ecologic and cultural basics.
If it would fail in future, there will be no back-up-levels as a fall-back security net anymore.
For this reasons, a platform like "The Knowledge" may be helpful for a debate how to:
- drive attention to the problems,
- collect and document basic informations,
- offer a survey on and access to sources of knowledge and craftmanship around milk production,
- encourage debates how to solve problems and avoid or overcome risks,
- motivate citizens, officials and NGOs to engage for sustainable, resilient and responsible ways of milk production.
Some elements for preventing milk production from hazards may be:
- rescue the genetic ressources of all dairy animals around the world:
as many as possible variations of cattles, yaks, buffaloes, goats, sheeps, camels, horses and reindeers!
- implementing ecological and social minimal standards,
- fair trade conditions for traditional dairy cultures,
- protect against environmental, socio-economic and ethic dumping methods,
- regional crisis intervention teams against risks like fire, flood, snowstorm, diseases, chemical and radioactive pollution, and breakdown of water and energy supply,
- conserving living examples of typical traditional dairy farms in every region,
- documenting traditional milk production technics in interactive museums,
- teach them as a part of professional educations,
- evolving innovations making modern dairy economy more sustainable and resilient...