Drink Milk be Healthy, the Magic of Milk

Come rain or shine; a cow must calve to produce milk and must be at least 1½ years old to bear a calf. Like humans, gestation period of cow is about 9 months whereas it is 10 months for buffaloes. The calf is fed its mother's milk till they are 8-9 weeks old. The mother cow makes special milk for her calf called the Colostrum just after calving. This special milk has extra vitamins and protein and helps the calf build immunity from illness. The period of giving milk is called lactation period. Different breeds of cattle (Indian and exotic) give different quantities of milk having different Fat and protein %age. More the milk yield lesser is the fat content.

Over the years, dairying has grown in leaps and bounds. Today, one cow can produce the milk that it once took 10 cows to produce! Before milking machines were invented in 1894, farmers could only milk about 6 cows per hour. Right now, farmers in Western countries use machines to milk more than 100 cows per hour! In the United States alone, 9.2 million cows are being milked in over 110,000 farms daily.

World milk record*
In America, top Holstein Friesian cows are known to produce up to 30833 kg of milk in 365 days. That's a whopping 84.47 litres of milk per day!
*Source:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/06/16/wcuba16.xml

Dairying in India:

World over, in most advanced countries dairying is carried out on a very large scale with each of the dairy farms owning a large number of animals. However, in India the picture is different. At the centre of the entire effort in dairying in India, is the farmer. He is a small farmer, or a labourer and owning on an average no more than one or two cows or buffaloes.

The co-operative pattern of milk procurement provides livelihood to over 13.89 million producer members. Today India's co-operative movement, which has made India the largest producer of milk, collects on an average 25.09 million kg of milk per day and markets an average 20.04 million litres of milk per day as liquid milk.

The Indian Dairy co-operatives:

The basic design of the co-operatives is quite simple - the milk producers of a village are organized into a village milk co-operative society, which is managed by their elected representatives. Only producer members can be elected as representatives.

The village societies are federated into a district union managed by the Board of Directors elected from the chairmen of the village societies. The unions, in turn, are federated into a state-level dairy federation which also is governed by elected representatives / chairmen of district milk unions.