Folks might’ve wondered why Pres Ali took time to visit a dairy and meat farm in Qatar…a desert country – which is counterintuitive for a country with 83,000 square miles of mostly vegetated land space!! Well, he was looking at the future of producing food from farms!! With the human population presently at 8 billion – up from 2 billion in 1927, and increasing to 9.7 billion by 2050 – and soil degrading and groundwater running out, there’s gonna have to be a whole lotta innovation to feed all those mouths!
The Qatari farm was born out of necessity – but it shows what can be done when a country has money and political will. Which Guyana luckily possesses right now under the PPP. If it were the PNC, that’d be another story! Just SIX years ago, tiny Qatar and its 2.7 million people were importing most of their food from Saudi Arabia and surrounding Arab countries, like the UAE. In that year, those countries imposed sanctions on Qatar, because they accused the latter of supporting Islamic terrorism against them. So, what did Qatar do?? Went elsewhere, like with Turkiye. But, more importantly, started trying to feed themselves.
They launched Baladna Farms outside their capital of Doha the same year – 2017 – on 240 hectares of desert. They constructed facilities to handle 24,000 cows – starting with 4000 that were flown in from Europe and Australia etc. So how do cows – which don’t perspire well – survive at 40°+ Celsius, which is equal to our 104° Fahrenheit?? Well, how about huge enclosed barns that have artesian wells, enabling the cows to be sprayed with water periodically and cool them down?? And feed?? Hay and other feedstock are supplied automatically to the cows that are in stalls.
Milking?? The cows enter a huge rotator – a largely automatic machine used for milking hundreds of cows successively, using a rotating platform!! That’s what the President was looking at in the pic. With all aspects of cow-rearing done with advanced machines, one can appreciate that the packaging of the mild and meat for sale becomes pretty routine. Even the calves are fed automatically from bottles, with milk provided by any cow – not just their mother!! Qatar had already achieved 50% self-sufficiency in this area.
So how does this matter to us?? Well, even though we’ve got all that land, since we also got money, we should look into the cost-benefit of using the Qatar model for dairy and beef. Because of the intensive feeding, caring, milking etc, Baladna’s telescoped the entire production process so that the efficiency – compared with the old open range method – is off the charts!!
Why harvest rice with “grass knives” when we got combines??
…of cow dung
Another point to consider is what happens to all the dung that will still be produced in such mechanised farms. No matter what we do, cows gotta shit!! Grass in…dung out!! Ever since we became conscious of global warming, scientists have recognized that methane – an atmospheric warming gas – is produced spontaneously from cow dung – not to mention cow burps. It’s a by-product of cows digesting grass. That’s why in New Zealand they’ve imposed a tax on cow burps!!
Now, what about the dung? Farmers in India and other traditional communities have long used the dung – and other vegetable waste – to produce methane for cooking by using “digesters”. And the Biden Administration has now introduced legislation that offers tax incentives for American mega, mechanised farms to use the “shit digesters” to produce methane – that can be converted to electricity!! Now, we know that Qatar, being one of the largest producers of Natural Gas – containing methane –doesn’t need this outlet.
But how about us??
…of Venezuelan sanctions
A group of Hispanic House Democrats wrote to President Biden last week, urging him to reverse Trump-era sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba. They cited humanitarian concerns. As if Biden needs justification – in addition to his yen for Venezuelan oil!!
