■iO-Laucasttr Farming, Saturday, July 26,1986
TUCSON, Ariz. - Camels may
not win beauty contests, but they
take high honors for their adap
tability to some of the earth’s
harshest climates.
One-humped camels, or
dromedaries, for example, have
been serving the desert-dwellers of
Africa and the Middle East for
thousands of years, building a
legendary reputation for toughness
and endurance as “ships of the
desert.”
Now, if an Israeli physiologist
has his way, one-humped camels
will become an important factor in
reducing mass starvation in these
drought-plagued regions.
How would they do it? With their
milk, says Dr. Reuven Yagil, a
member of the health sciences
faculty at Ben-Gurion University
of the Negev in Beersheva.
Self-Sufficient
In Drought
“Camel farming is one of the
ways that will make farmers self
sufficient in time of drought,”
Yagil and co-author Z. Etzion
wrote in a paper presented to an
international conference on arid
lands.
While emphasizing that camels
should co-exist with, not replace,
traditional animals such as cattle,
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Camel's Milk: An Alternative Food
sheep, and goats, “during periods
of drought they will be the main
stay of food production,” they
wrote. Look at all camels have
going for them:
Even when drinking water is
scarce and brackish, camels
continue to ' produce highly
nutritious, vitamin-filled milk. In
the driest weather, camels’ milk
production remains high enough to
“keep numerous people alive.”
When “fodder is minimal and
spread over a vast area,” camels
get enough to eat. They are
browsers that wander as far as 30
miles a day and eat almost
anything, including thorny bushes.
“I call it natural pruning,” Yagil
said in an interview. And unlike
cows, sheep, and goats, camels
relish salty desert plants.
Camel milk stays sweet for a
long time. “Whereas milk of most
mammals sours within days, even
when kept in a refrigerator, camel
milk remains virtually unchanged
after three months of storage.’ ’
Despite all these advantages,
however, camels have an image
problem: They’ve traditionally
been a milk source only for
nomadic tribes, and they’re
viewed as a throwback to more
primitive, unmechanized times.
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Contrary to their reputation as
wanderers, Yagil said, camels
prosper in stalls. He’s been ex
perimenting with penned-up
camels for 15 years. “The idea is
that this could be a farming
method for the thousands of people
who have left farming and moved
to the city looking for some kind of
sustenance,” he said.
Reproduce Slowly
Another negative factor has been
camels’ slow reproductive per
formance. Female nomadic
j When it rains, do you put on your boots and
j raincoat and go outside to play? Or do you race
t WHERE for shelter? Like people, some animals seem to
T'vf'v TI fry enjoy the rain. Other animals look for nature’s
U'*-' * iIE. I “umbrellas. ” Here’s a neat quiz on where
GO IN THE animals go in the rain.
q A IMQ Write the letter of the right answer in the
• blank space next to the animal’s name
Raccoon
iarro'
Duck
Ant
Orangutan
6. Young newt
(a kind of salamander)
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1 111
in Arid Unds
camels sometimes don’t give birth
until they are seven years old. But
through the use of hormonal in
jections, the birth process has been
speeded up by four years in stall
fed camels.
Yagil, a consultant to the Food
and Agriculture Organization and
author of a new book on camels,
said the FAO has set up demon
stration camel farms in several
countries, including the Sudan and
Kenya, with more planned.
By next spring, using a “crisis
(gfe.
2
team,” he hopes to present the
FAO with the numbers and
locations of milk camels in
Ethiopia and other countries. Then
he expects to send out demon
stration teams to show reluctant
farmers how effective camels can
be.
And sometime in the future,
Yagil said, he foresees solar
energy-powered camel-milking
machines to increase the quantity
of milk that will be distributed
where it will do the most good.
a. heads for its burrow
b. usually takes shelter in its den
c. may come out into the rain from
under a rock or log
d. usually keeps floating on open
water but may tuck its head next to
its body and go to sleep
e. tries to find shelter in a leafy tree
f. may break off a leafy tree branch
and use it as an umbrella
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