Milk and Milk Products
All mammals including whales produce milk, a white nutrient rich liquid from the mammary glands. It has been described as the perfect food because this all baby mammals eat/drink until their digestive organs have developed to digest other foods. During the 1st 3-5 days of the baby, the mother produces a special type of milk called colostrum to pass on her antibodies against diseases.
My father, Cebu City Veterinarian Nestor Alonso opened a small dairy, Alonso Milk Farm in 1949. His dilemma was selecting a suitable breed of milking cow. Cattle from temperate areas need a cool climate like Baguio or Bukidnon while cattle from India can tolerate the heat but you cannot use milking machine to automate production. You need the calf to stimulate let-down reflex before milk starts to flow.
He began a lifelong quest to produce a Philippine dairy cattle by combining the efficient milk production traits of Western breeds and the heat tolerance of the Indian cows. It takes a very long time to breed cattle because gestation period is like, excuse me, humans (279-287 days), only one calf is produced (twins are rare and if one twin is a male, the female twin is sterile) and a 50-50 % chance it is a female.
You need the numbers to produce a cattle breed and the farm expanded in 1965 to Kalasungay/ Imapalutao Bukidnon with its semi-temperate climate and ample land for cattle farming. He did apply for funding for his breeding research but foreign experts thought his work was a threat to the business interest of their countries. The Philippines imports 95% of its milk requirements.
In Cebu, the market for fresh pasteurized milk was limited to customers with refrigerators and it stay fresh only for 4 days. The farm in Bukidnon had to sell fresh milk in Cagayan de Oro. There were many times we had to throw away the milk. The research was a success, but it was failure as a business.
Today, Bukidnon Milk Company, operated by the Universal Harvester Dairy Farms Inc. produces fresh milk, fresh chocolate milk and yogurt. The latter is result of friendly bacterial fermentation of the lactose in milk producing lactic acid that digest milk protein that gives yogurt its texture and and tart flavor.
The company takes pride as the 21st Century Dairy Farm with 2,000 cows, 460 hectares of land and 50 Store Partners. I got this information from their website (https:// bukidnonmilkcompany.com/).
In Cebu, you can call 09177990765 for orders. I went to MAGMA in Streetscape, Banilad and bought a bottle each of fresh milk, chocolate milk and strawberry yogurt. Last night, I opened the Baguio strawberry yogurt and it was good.
This morning, I tried the fresh milk and I could taste buttery cream. I brought the remaining milk to the office and my co-workers also tasted it. It not just good, it was excellent! In fact, I went back to buy some more bottles of fresh milk and the Cebu mango yogurt.