When White displaces Green

It shouldn't surprise if the money from sale of milk in litres, at the end of the year, adds up to more than that from the quintals of paddy or sugarcane.

More than a fifth of India's agricultural output by value today comes from milk. In 2014-15-the latest year for which detailed estimates at individual crop level is available - the value of milk production, at Rs 495,840.52 crore, for the first time, exceeded even the Rs 486,845.87 crore for foodgrains that includes all cereals and pulses.

The accompanying table shows that in many states - virtually the entire northern belt covering Rajasthan, Haryana, Punjab, Jammu & Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, plus Gujarat - milk accounts for over, or just under, a quarter of the value of their total output from farming and allied sectors. It puts paid to assumptions by policymakers and even academic scholars, who have for long viewed livestock farming as a "subsidiary" activity to "regular" crop agriculture.

The subsidiary treatment to dairying may have some justification at an individual farmer level. Income from milk could well be lower than from their main crop for most farmers. However, even this might, in many cases, be obscured by the fact that milk marketing happens round-the-year, as opposed to the more visible money generated from the one-time sale of paddy, wheat, sugarcane or cotton. Bulk income from the so-called main crop may help marry one's daughter or build a new house, but the cash from milk sales is what is squirrelled away by the homemaker to meet the family's day-to-day expenses. It shouldn't surprise if the money from sale of milk in litres, at the end of the year, adds up to more than that from the quintals of paddy or sugarcane.

Also, while a sugarcane grower may not cultivate cotton, just as mustard or chana farmers are unlikely to plant paddy, virtually all of them produce some quantity of milk. If every farmer is, by implication, a dairy farmer - a rising share of the milk that the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (Amul) procures is now being supplied those having 30 or more animals, fed on fodder grown in-house

(see The Big Picture: A new churning ) - it makes all the more sense to discard the traditional "subsidiary" view of dairying.