An efficient and modern dairy
The great thing about having a dairy herd on a smallholding, is that you never have any doubt about how to organise your day. You get up and do the milking and put the animals out to pasture. OK, if it's raining, or in winter, there might be a variation on this routine.
Then what do you do with the milk? Aisha does a fantastic job of keeping her extended family and all the visitors supplied with lebneh, the strained yoghurt which is an essential ingredient on a Palestinian table.
Lebneh in olive oil
This was a staple at Aisha's breakfasts. We would also eat it at lighter evening meals too. You tear off a piece of flatbread and dip it in the bowl of oil,
smearing off a pinch of the soft cheese.
The big headache for dairy farmers anywhere is the difference in price between the milk they produce, and the packaged dairy products that consumers buy in the shops.
For a small-holding, the level of investment required to set up a cheese-house or yoghurt factory is frightening; the work and time needed to transform the milk are often beyond what is manageable on a family farm.
The solution is the pooling of resources, and Tuwani has created a structure to do this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URCjy0OYH8k (select cookies at the foot of this page to play the embedded video)
The dairy is just up the road from the Guesthouse, and I was delighted to be able to pop in and chat to people about goats and cheese-making.
The business processes the milk from several herds in the area. Stainless steel equipment and sturdy refrigeration systems enable the cheese-makers to create various different products, including
what I believe to be a Halloumi-type cheese, yoghurt, fresh lebneh and dried lebneh.
These are sold to retailers in al-Khalil (Hebron) - the neigbouring city is a major economic hub in the occupied West Bank .
This is the kind of infrastructure that allows ecologically sustainable family farms and smallholdings to be economically viable. My colleague farmers in France struggle to build collective projects like this. Rules created to suit industrial agriculture make life difficult for small-scale farmers. Tuwani's dairy is for me a beacon of hope: traditional, sustainable, Palestinian products bringing in money!
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