The French dairy goat sector, a unique success

The French goat, a “rustic” ruminant that has become a performance model Originally, like all ruminants, the goat is reared both for its milk and its meat. But if this animal remains a familiar figure in traditional farming in many countries, in none of them has the promotion of dairy production been pushed as far as in France. An animal that has remained hardy in regions with a dry climate and not very fertile soil, emblematic of subsistence agriculture for which it represents above all a capital of meat on the hoof, self-consumable for the breeder, it has only subject to genetic selection only for a few decades in developed countries. It can be added that even in the other countries which have a dairy goat tradition, the yield reduced to the total number of goats is very low, of the order of 50 to 150 liters per year: it is in fact a question of 'a theoretical average that includes dairy-dominated farms and meat-dominated farms. Spain itself, although an exporter of goat's milk, ...