Camel milk farming in UAE

Gulf News

The Emirates Industry for Camel Milk and Products (EICMP), is the world's first and only camel farm to specialise in milk production on a large scale. See more at: http://gulfnews.com/gntv

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00:00For thousands of years, camels have been an integral part of the desert regions of the

00:12Arabian Peninsula.

00:16Their ability to function in hot, arid and harsh conditions made them the ideal companion

00:20for the desert dweller.

00:21But when urbanization took over, some of the camel's most valuable attributes went out

00:26of use.

00:28A Dubai-based farm has embarked on an ambitious project to make camel milk desirable again.

00:34Enter Camelicious, a slightly saltier but significantly healthier alternative package

00:38to do just that.

00:39At the processing unit, four different flavors of camel milk are pasteurized and bottled

00:42to be transported to the UAE supermarkets.

00:53We have four flavors as on date, strawberry, date, chocolate and saffron.

00:58And we do have the drinking yogurt also, which is known in this part of the world as Laban.

01:03A lot of works have been done on the animal as wendricite to augment the milk production.

01:11Peter Nagy and Yud Kayu has run the Selective Breeding and Embryo Transfer Program that

01:15makes this possible.

01:16If we apply selective breeding, then we can achieve a better production and it is good

01:23for our company because then one camel will have higher income, more production, with

01:29the given cost, the profit will be higher, or return to profit, I would say.

01:34What we have done and what is a new thing, that we have used this technology for milking

01:38camels.

01:39Normally the camels produce one or two ova, egg, and with a special treatment, we produce

01:46much more egg on the ovary.

01:50We mated these camels with a selected bull, and after a certain day, we flushed these

01:56embryos out of the donor mother, and we put the embryos into the surrogate mother, and

02:03normally the surrogate mother are low producing animals, so they are healthy, they have no

02:08problem at all, just genetically they are not able to produce so much milk.

02:12The success rate is close to 60%, so that means that out of 10 transfers, 6 are getting

02:21pregnant.

02:23The scientists say that convincing the consumer to pick up a bottle of camel milk may be the

02:27bigger challenge.

02:28It is not easy to convince people, and I don't think that camel milk would replace cow milk.

02:32I am from Denmark, and in Denmark we only have cows, so I was really fascinated when

02:37I found out that you could have camel milk here, so I decided to try it, and it sounds

02:44a little strange to me, but it's quite good actually.

02:47Yes, I've tried it once in Saudi Arabia in 2005, it was a journey of like 600 kilometers,

02:54and on the desert way there was a farm of camels, where I tried this, and I found it

03:01very, it was like a very bad experience for me, because my stomach wasn't able to digest

03:07that camel milk.

03:10I have not really tried camel milk, because it's sort of, since I've been child, and I've

03:18grown up till now, I thought the perfect milk is just the milk from the cow milk, so I never

03:25had impression that the camel milk could be a good option.

03:29It's like, not a normal drink, it's like from, you know, like vitamins there, and everything

03:37is there, and it's good for body, so that's why the people in desert was so strong more

03:45than us, who lives here in city, because they knows about it, and it's so awesome actually,

03:53it's very good thing.

03:56What is sure, however, is that if the product does become mainstream, it could be the first

04:00time in history that camel milk will go from the farm bowl to attractive bottles on our

04:04breakfast tables.

04:05Abbas El Lawati, Gulf News.

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