 Dr. Robinson is a scientist who is known for championing pastoralism. And she found the right kind of people whose way of life was under threat because of their dependence on camels. And she decided to help. And this beautiful journey of hers lands us what we're talking about today, which is cheese and how she's using cheese as a tool to kind of bring back, revive this, revive the camel population and save the camels and the culture of the people in Rajasthan, in the Raikha community. So, over to you, Dr. Robinson. Thank you very much. Good evening. It's wonderful to be here and to share, yes, the potential of camel cheese. I really, it's not an exaggeration. I'm getting more and more convinced that the cheese is actually the solution to save the camels of Rajasthan. And I'm going to start with a little short movie that gives you the background of, I want to show you a little movie. It's not there. That's too bad. Then I'll just have to tell you the story. OK, so the background is that I came here almost 30 years ago to study camels. And I came across the Raikha community at that time. They were not known, but they totally fascinated me as a veterinary doctor with the love for camels because they had such an intimate relationship with their camels. Like they were never using them for meat. They weren't selling the milk. They were basically just breeding male camels to sell them at the Pushka Fair as transport animals. And they have this really close relationship and they talk to their camels and they can control. A single person can control about 50 camels and they listen to the commands and they are very, very friendly. These camels, if you stand among them, they come and they kiss you basically if they're well treated camels. So I was totally fascinated at the time, but I was also exposed to a lot of the problems. They were telling me our camels are dying and there's no grazing areas for them and there's a disease. And can you help us? So this actually kind of changed me from an academic to more like an activist. And I started an NGO to support the Raikha and to support pastoralists in general. So for a long time we were just providing camel health care. We were fighting with the foresters for access to grazing in the forest and all these things. But it didn't really help at all. Then in the early 2000s camels were actually begun to be slaughtered. It was something that wasn't talked about because it went totally against the Essex of the Raikha community, but still they were sold at Pushka and then from there they went to Hyderabad and different places and they were used for meat. But it was something nobody talked about. So the camel population went down not because of the slaughter actually but because there wasn't enough grazing grounds for the camels. The young people didn't want to breed camels because there was no income. And then when the Rajasthan government finally found out about this, the chief minister she actually said we have to do something and she declared the camel state animal. And this was in 2014 and we thought now the camel is going to be helped and there's going to be special programs to support the camel breeders and so on. But that's actually not what happened. What happened was that a law was put into place that stopped, that made it illegal to take camels out of Rajasthan. And almost everything was forbidden that you can do with camels. You weren't allowed to castrate them. You couldn't put a nose peg in their nose. All kinds of things were prohibited. And this was really unfortunately the kind of the death knell for the camel because early on they had, the Raika had made all their income once a year at Pushkar where they were selling the female camels where they were selling the male camels. And suddenly so this market kind of totally fell apart. The buyers weren't coming anymore because they couldn't take the camels out of Rajasthan legally. And so since 2014-15, the situation has really gone very bad. So the only way of actually, if you want to save the camel, if you want to save the culture that people need to be in a position to make a living from keeping camels. So we started different things. We made a little factory to make camel poo paper. We set up a wool unit to process the camel wool. But the big potential really is in the camel milk. Here in India, there's actually no tradition of drinking camel milk. And I mean, for 20 years, I listened to people saying camel milk is disgusting. It's inedible, et cetera. But then actually things changed because it became known that a lot of autistic children respond really well to camel milk. And an American mother of an autistic child, she's actually written a book about this. So this kind of filtered through to India and we were getting requests from parents of autistic children to send them camel milk. So we set up this dairy, India's first camel dairy, the Kumbh Ghat camel dairy, where we can process about 200 liters of milk per day. And what we do is we pasteurize the milk, we put it into small bottles, 200 ml, and then we deep freeze it and then we send it in ice boxes direct to the end consumer, by bus usually. And so this has been going on, but it's actually a very difficult business because the infrastructure in India is just there and the logistics are really difficult. So it's very expensive. It makes the milk very expensive for the consumer and for us it's almost impossible to make a profit. But the good thing is that earlier it was also thought one cannot make cheese from camel milk. The camel milk is actually very different from cow's milk. In a way it's much better. It has different proteins than camel milk, than cow's milk. It has very high iron content, 10 times as much as cow's milk. It has various proteins in it that raise your body's immune system. But it doesn't curdle. You can't make curd from it and you couldn't make cheese from it. But fortunately for us, a Danish company in the about eight years ago, so they developed a special enzyme, a special rennet with which you can curdle the camel milk. And this rennet was actually first experimented with in Kenya for African pastoralists. So when we heard that it is now possible to make camel milk, we actually managed to get two cheese experts to us, one from Austria and a lady from Denmark who's been living in Kenya and she's the one who tried out making cheese from camel milk among the nomads in Kenya. So they both came over here several time and we've been working on developing cheeses and it's been very successful. The cheese is absolutely delicious. It doesn't need much of a cool chain. In fact, we've made one kind of cheese, feta cheese and it doesn't need, it's conserved in oil and it doesn't need a refrigerator at all. You can keep it for months, no refrigeration necessary. It's absolutely delicious. So now the interest is really increasing in camel cheese and I just wish I could let you taste some. I'm just gonna show you what we have. We have three kinds of cream cheese. We have red pepper, green pepper and we have black pepper and we have, and this is our feta cheese in oil and the spices, these Mediterranean spices, garlic, rosemary and thyme in olive oil or in mustard oil and yes, I just wish I could let you try the cheese, but unfortunately I can't. But the interesting thing about the cheese is that it probably, because it's not processed at a high temperature, it's processed at 40 degrees, 50 degrees which is less than the temperature we use for pasteurization. So it means all the good, the healing components of the camel milk they are retained in the cheese and we haven't made any experiments yet but I believe the autistic children, they might respond very well to the camel cheese as well. So we're trying to build it up as a, also, I mean, except for apart from the medicinal value, we also want to make it like Rajasthan's heritage health food it's regaining momentum and I can see something really great happening.