engleski

Sustainable small scale cattle production – Croatian example – possibility lost?

Definitions of sustainable agriculture usually include references to financial, environmental, ethical, social and product quality issues. In addition to those considerations, sustainable livestock production also needs to address animal welfare issues. Croatian cattle production for decades is based on small units. Even nowadays more than 80% of cows are kept in small holds from 1 to 10 cows per herd. For last 20 years cattle production was criticized for too many small production units and lots of efforts was put into enlargement without many thoughts about it. Those efforts resulted with almost 50% less cattle (1990 – 829.000 ; 2009 – 447.000), total amount of milk produced was raising but now is falling seriously and number of households selling milk reduced for almost two thirds, from 58.715 in 2003 to 19.902 in 2010. Lots of efforts and lots more of money were invested but unfortunately it seems that we “gave fish instead of learned farmers how to fish”. Anyway, it seems that we are on the start again and we have to change direction to sustainable small scale production which we had from the beginning. People were and still are producing milk on farms with mixed animal production (cattle, pigs and poultry, somewhere sheep). In the same time beef was produced in a system of cooperatives with finishing fattening on specialized farms. Croatia was exporter of so called “baby beef” which was and still is appreciated on market. So now we are facing rural depopulation, social issue of working places lost in agriculture, more dependence on import of agricultural products and devastating impact of huge farms on environment which is very easy to see in some developed EU countries. Taking into account the definition of sustainable livestock production and all of the mentioned above serious efforts should be put into education and technological modernization of production, especially of high quality products with local origin.

sustainable; cattle; production

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