Forget everything you thought you knew about camels being grumpy pack animals roaming the desert; they might just be the next big thing in global agriculture.
If you’re living in Europe or the US, the idea of dousing your cereal in camel milk or cooking up a romantic camel steak for your partner might seem strange, but the humped animal has been a staple of diets in certain communities for thousands of years.
Now, camels are on the rise beyond their traditional homelands and their produce is cropping up on shelves around the globe.
It’s even the UN’s International Year of the Camelids (the family of animals that includes camels, alpacas and llamas), celebrations for which include a grand parade of camels and their cousins through the streets of Paris on 20 April.
According to the UN, camels already contribute about 8 per cent of total milk production in Sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile, market research estimates that the global camel milk trade could exceed $13 billion by the end of the decade, up from $1.3 billion in 2022.
“It is pretty rapid growth,” Dr Ariell Ahearn, departmental lecturer in human geography at the University of Oxford, tells BBC Science Focus.
Ahearn explains that in countries like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan and Mongolia, camel milk is already commonplace in grocery store refrigerators and that as investors spy a good business opportunity, money is pouring into new farms across the region.
“By 2050, it’s possible we’ll have more choice between cow's milk and camel's milk in the UK,” she says.
Indeed, farms are beginning to crop up in the western countries too. The largest farm in the US now spans over 1,000 acres in the hill country of Missouri and hosts over 200 camels.
So, with their rise in popularity all but assured, could camels be the new cows, taking over pastures (or sand dunes?) around the world?
Why are we seeing a shift to camels?
2024 isn’t just about parades and raising awareness for how cool (and, frankly, weird-looking) these animals are – the International Year of the Camelids has an important mission to highlight why these creatures are a part of our future food chain.
Climate change is causing global temperatures to rise, with habitats across the planet becoming increasingly inhospitable to life. Frankly, cows just aren’t going to cut it in some places in the world where temperatures are expected to soar and pressures on food security are increasing; but camels might.
There are several benefits to using camels in arid climates, explains Ahearn and her colleague Dr Ilse Köhler-Rollefson, a pastoralist, veterinarian and author of Camel Karma: Twenty years among India's camel nomads.
Firstly, camels are designed for harsh conditions.
“Cows are fine in Europe in a temperate climate,” Köhler-Rollefson says, “but I mean, where there are camels naturally, it’s obviously better to use camels.”
While Köhler-Rollefson isn’t in favour of setting up super-camel farms akin to the super-dairy farms operating today, she points out, for example, that “one of the arguments that’s been made in favour of it is that camels don’t need air conditioning since they can put up with high temperatures.”
More significantly, camels are just more efficient than cows at turning food and water inputs into meat and dairy outputs – vital in regions where food and water are already becoming more scarce.
“If you were to compare one litre of camel milk to one litre of cow milk, you need a lot less feed and water to produce the camel milk,” says Ahearn.
Research backs this up. A 2022 study published in the journal Nature Food showed that as environmental conditions worsen in Sub-Saharan Africa, replacing cattle populations with camel and goat farms could easily pick up the slack – milk production actually increased in the scenario, with water and food demand decreasing. At the same time, greenhouse gas emissions shrank.
A major source of emissions in cattle farming comes from the cows themselves when they, ahem, burp and fart. Camels have them pipped on that front too, with research in the journal PLOS One showing that the humped nomads produce significantly less methane – the potent greenhouse gas that traps 28 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide – than ruminants.
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Is it time for you to add camels to your diet?
At this point, you might be convinced that in some areas of the world, it’s time to give cows the boot (or, er, hoof?). But does this mean you’ll end up having camel milk cocoa before bed?
Whereas climate necessity may warrant a shift away from cows in some parts of the world, the health benefits of consuming camel products might force a shift in places where the climate isn’t the issue.
“Camel milk has a much higher vitamin C and iron content than cow milk; it can be consumed by people who are lactose intolerant; and it usually has a low-fat content,” says Köhler-Rollefson.
Moreover, research suggests it can lower blood sugar and improve insulin sensitivity in people with diabetes, and it even contains immune system-boosting ingredients.
As for the meat, camel meat is somewhat of a delicacy in the Middle East and North Africa, with the humps, which are not filled with water as childhood imaginations would have you believe, being the most prized part. Often, it’s consumed as part of family or religious celebrations.
Compared to beef or lamb, camel meat is leaner, lower in cholesterol and higher in iron – in other words, healthier.
Camels: coming to a farm near you?
Despite the success of a handful of camel farms in the US and Europe, both Ahearn and Köhler-Rollefson remain sceptical about whether they'll completely replace cows across swathes of Western countries.
In other regions where it makes more sense to employ this ancient creature to meet food needs, the pair wants to see a move away from an industrialised model where animals are kept in confined spaces.
Köhler-Rollefson, who owns a camel dairy business herself, says it “defeats the ecological purpose of camels because they have these long legs and they can walk for hours, converting energy from the Sun embedded in drought-resistant desert plants into food for us.”
Instead, the largest camel farms in the UAE and Saudi Arabia are fed using alfalfa, flown all the way from the US. “If we’re importing feed from California to feed camels in Saudi Arabia, then you get high emissions regardless,” says Ahearn.
“The current systems for keeping cows and producing them in the way we do are very inefficient, and people are thinking, ‘Oh, we’re just going to have huge camel dairies as a replacement for cow dairies’ without actually thinking about how cow dairies are an environmental problem.”
She hopes that a more free-range, nomadic model of farming will “demonstrate an alternative to industrialised farming that is more environmentally friendly. Camels are a great example of that because they’re so resilient to climate hazards and variability.”
About our experts
Ariell Ahearn is a departmental lecturer in human geography at the University of Oxford. Prior to this, she was the course director of the MSc/Mphil in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance. Since 2004, Ahearn has worked extensively in rural Mongolia with mobile pastoralist communities around land use and rural development issues.
Ilse Köhler-Rollefson is a German scientist known for championing pastoralism, ethnoveterinary medicine and camels. She has spent decades studying and working with Raika camel herders in India, where she now loves. In 2010, she co-founded Camel Charisma, a social enterprise that aims to develop, promote and market environmentally friendly products from the camel.
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