Dairy Farming in Mountain Areas

Dairy Farming is one of the key economic activities livestock-dependent farming communities in the mountain areas depend upon. Dairy farming involves natural resource base-forests/rangelands, croplands, livestock breeding-feeding, breeding, health management, marketing and consumption of the products. This book presents wonderful synthesis of the smallholders resource management in the mountains. Smallholders constitute the majority of the mountain communities. Their strategies of resource management this book portrays provide the interesting matter the institutions might like to know about before they being with the interventions into dairy farming. Mountain areas are altogether distinguishable from those of the mainstream plain areas. And so are their production systems. Peri-urban areas in the region constitute the high-pressure areas. Dairy farming in these areas is essentially market-oriented. The book especially characterizes the smallholder dairy farms in the vicinity of urban milk consuming centres. These scenarios are different from those in the remote areas. Smallholder dairy farming has enormous potential. It can contribute to family income, generate gainful employment especially for women, elevate living standards of the producers, fight malnutrition especially amongst children and enhance processes of sustainable agriculture. Crop-livestock-forest/rangeland integrity is a key factor to the sustainability of mountain livelihoods. Augmentation of dairy farming systems leads to the enhanced performance of the overall production system. The book finally discusses perspective based approaches to operationalise sustainability in the mountains. The book, in essence, is a landmark publication in the area of sustainable mountain development. India is the leading milk producer in the world today, which is largely thanks to the smallholders’ contributions. Dairy development could be one of the key areas to help the country to occupy centre stage in the on-going rapid globalisation processes. This book is an humble attempt to further advance towards this direction.