Access to milk is a great thing, because you get the calories and many nutrients needed to sustain life, and all you need is a cow, goat or sheep (which is mobile) and pasture.
Compare that to cereal crops like wheat or maize or vegetable crops, which require long uninterrupted growing seasons and irrigation.
Why is this important? When a troop of rampaging soldiers cuts through your village and pillages everything in sight, you grab your cows and family and boogey out of there. Essentially, you have a mobile food supply.
In the event of a drought, you have options as well. With wheat or vegetables, no rain == no food. With a dairy animal, you go kill the guy who controls the next pasture and let Old Bessie the cow feast on the grass. (The other key development was the introduction of potatoes, which remain buried under the ground safe from the rampaging army above -- my Irish ancestors subsisted on potatoes hidden from the English taxman and a cow that lived in the house.)
In Europe and the Near East, these things were really important, because there was always pillaging armies marching across the continent. Today, it's unlikely that some Mongol horde is going to loot my supermarket, so I drink milk and eat cheese because they are really tasty.
In India, Cow is more of divine than Bovine. As author rightly mentioned "Agriculture-plus-dairying became the backbone", in Indian civilization, it has been imbibed in culture that they both go hand in hand.Their interdependence is well known Cow eats Grass/waste crops, Cow dung/urine is used as manure for the crop and mosquito repellants etc. And outputs of both are enjoyed by the farmer - Crop and Milk products :)
Up until recently, most of Indian farming depended on (and still does to a good extent) on Bulls ploughing the fields for seeding. That and bullock carts as transport.
Well, yes. You don't want one bull to do 100% of cows, but one bull can easily do an entire herd, and using In Vitro methods the most valuable bulls fertilise thousands of cows.
What you're alluding to is that milk producing animals are able to turn grass into milk, something we (humans) long ago lost the ability to do. We are unable to digest cellulose for ourselves so we rely on cows and goats and so on to do it for us. Due to the ready availability in per-industrialized Europe of grassland having a cow or goat always means, thanks to the lactose tolerance gene, that humans prosper.
Compare that to cereal crops like wheat or maize or vegetable crops, which require long uninterrupted growing seasons and irrigation.
Why is this important? When a troop of rampaging soldiers cuts through your village and pillages everything in sight, you grab your cows and family and boogey out of there. Essentially, you have a mobile food supply.
In the event of a drought, you have options as well. With wheat or vegetables, no rain == no food. With a dairy animal, you go kill the guy who controls the next pasture and let Old Bessie the cow feast on the grass. (The other key development was the introduction of potatoes, which remain buried under the ground safe from the rampaging army above -- my Irish ancestors subsisted on potatoes hidden from the English taxman and a cow that lived in the house.)
In Europe and the Near East, these things were really important, because there was always pillaging armies marching across the continent. Today, it's unlikely that some Mongol horde is going to loot my supermarket, so I drink milk and eat cheese because they are really tasty.