Martin Cotilla was once a miner. Perhaps he still would be; but circumstances presently had left him in a situation where his previous skillset wasn't required. So here he was now, in the broiling hot Bolivian Chaco, with these... things. Cows. More specifically, Gyr cattle, imported from India at some expense [the better part of a million dollars, in fact]. One of them took a look at him, swished his tail, and mooed. They looked damn peculiar, not like the few cows he had seen growing up, European varieties. Supposedly, they were more adapted to the tropical lowlands of the Chaco, or even the Amazonian jungle, though the jungle would have to be cleared in a way that the Chaco would not. There were only 2,000 Gyrs now, but soon enough there would be many, many more. Within a year or two, nearly 4,000, within a few more years, nearly twice that again--and of course, the Gyr would be crossed with the much larger Bolivian beef cattle population to create even more dairying cattle.

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As things stood, daily milk production already totaled around 16,000 litres, not a totally insignificant sum in a country with a mere three million people--enough for thirty or forty thousand schoolchildren to whom the fresh milk was soon to be distributed, if still a twentieth of the dairy production target. A small army of milkmaids [a large number of whom were, in fact, children] readily pulled at the teat of Bolivia's economy.

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While Martin Cotilla and his associates have been tending to the new Bolivian state dairy herd, under the Bolivian state dairy concern "Darbol", the Bolivian agency for state planning has already gotten ideas into its head. Once dairy production hits the target, distribution will begin to become a problem, and thus plans for the construction of a number of ice-based refrigerator cars have been established, but more importantly, we plan to produce milk powder and cheese, a high protein substance that is excellent for the youth.

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Meanwhile, Bolivian efforts to increase honey production have also been redoubled with the introduction of the new, novel East African Lowland Honeybee. An initial shipment of queens from Kenya has arrived, and results are highly promising, with the tropical-adapted bee producing over four times the amount of conventional European honeybees, which are more suited to the temperate, northern climates. The increased honey production will be a small, but vital part in ensuring Bolivian self-sufficiency, although beekeepers in Bolivia already report that the new African bees are more difficult to manage than the docile local populations.