Dutchman battles bureaucracy to spread the milk of camel kindness

Published on Friday 18 September 2009 22:11

PUTTING aside the advisability of trying to make a living milking camels, you would not think the process itself too difficult.

You would be wrong.

The camels grazing on a patch of farmland a few miles outside Den Bosch in Holland may look happy enough. But milking them is another story; moody camels spit and kick, and mares give milk only if a calf is nearby.

"You have to show them respect," said Frank Smits, owner of the camel farm. "They're a lot more stubborn than cows."

Smits, the only farmer in Europe with permission to sell camel's milk, is as stubborn as his camels. Since starting his farm at Cromvoirt in 2006, he has run foul of animal rights advocates, Dutch agricultural authorities and the European Union, which forbids the import of camels.

Smits, 26, saw a market for camel's milk in the rising number of immigrants to Europe from Somalia and Morocco, where camel's milk has long been popular for its supposed medicinal properties. His milk sells for around 5 a pint at a few dozen Islamic groceries and health food stores in the Netherlands, with the rest exported to Belgium, Germany and Britain.

In muddy jeans and boots, he looks every bit the young farmer. But he insists he is not in it for the money.

"Working as a checkout boy at the supermarket would pay better," he said. The camels cost about $11,000 each, he said, and one camel produces only about a gallon and a half of milk daily.

His motivation was a 2006 report by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, which promotes camel's milk not only for its nutritional value but also as a revenue source, especially for nomadic farmers. It said the market for camel's milk products could be as large as $10 billion.

Simply getting the camels was not easy. The EU does not allow them to be imported, so Smits found some in the Canary Islands, which belong to Spain.

He shipped in three pregnant females. Animal welfare groups cried foul, arguing the nation already had enough exploited animals – but he still managed to get his operation running, only to have it shut down a few months later by agricultural authorities because camels were not on an official list of farm animals.

Smits paid to have a Dutch government agency investigate whether they could be added to the list, which meant having to show he could run the farm "without unacceptable animal welfare consequences".

Whatever medicinal properties camel's milk may have are thought by its devotees to disappear if it is pasteurised. The belief has limited its distribution – unpasteurised milk is generally forbidden in Europe.

But Smits managed to obtain permission to produce unpasteurised camel's milk, which he does with the help of a milking machine he developed. Some experts estimate a camel's daily output could be raised to as much as five gallons using modern equipment.

For Smits, milk is only the beginning. Last year, he developed a camel's milk cheese that sells for about 40 a pound, and he hopes to introduce bread to the world's growing array of camel's-milk products, like chocolate, ice cream and soap.

He now owns about 40 camels

but says that to make a profit he needs about 120, which he hopes to have before 2015. He is looking for a bigger farm.