Changhua County opened its dairy cow festival yesterday as part of efforts to support the local industry, an official at the county’s Department of Agriculture said yesterday.
The two-day annual event was expected to help increase consumption of milk and other dairy products in the winter, which is usually the peak season for milk production, but low season for consumption.
The festival, held in a grain barn in Fusing Township (福興), was organized by the department and the farmers’ association of the township, where most of the county’s dairy cows are raised.
EDUCATION
The festival displayed photos and video clips on the milk production process and development of the county’s dairy industry to show how milk is produced and how dairy cows are raised.
There was also a series of activities giving children the chance to roll up milk rice balls or paint cutouts in the shape of cows.
GOT MILK?
The farm also provided children with empty milk cartons to draw on and compete to see who came up with the most creative design.
Activities during the first day also included a milk drinking contest, which, rather than asking participants to drink as much milk as they could, invited them to make funny faces after finishing drinking, the official said.
MILK CENTRAL
Changhua County has a total of 102 milk farmers who raise 21,700 dairy cows.
Overall, Changhua produces about 65,000 tonnes of milk every year, about one-fifth of the country’s total annual production.
Milk farms can be found in each of the county’s 26 townships and many of them have been operated for more than 30 years.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comment last year on Tokyo’s potential reaction to a Taiwan-China conflict has forced Beijing to rewrite its invasion plans, a retired Japanese general said. Takaichi told the Diet on Nov. 7 last year that a Chinese naval blockade or military attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, potentially allowing Tokyo to exercise its right to collective self-defense. Former Japan Ground Self-Defense Force general Kiyofumi Ogawa said in a recent speech that the remark has been interpreted as meaning Japan could intervene in the early stages of a Taiwan Strait conflict, undermining China’s previous assumptions
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan