RESOURCE POTENTIAL OF THE ALTAI REGION REGARDING ENVIRONMENTALLY SAFE DAIRY PRODUCTION
Currently, one of the main tasks facing each state is to provide the population with environmentally safe food. The Altai Region is the largest producer of dairy products. Despite the constant increase in the production of dairy products, the level of use of the average annual capacity of large and medium-sized enterprises does not reach the optimal value (85%). This is caused by insufficient volume of raw milk production. For the period from 2010 to 2016 the production of raw milk in the Region is slightly more than 1,400 thousand tons per year. The annual decline in the production of raw milk is 0.2%, mainly due to the reduction in livestock herd and the percentage of cows in agricultural organizations with higher milk production. Significant season pattern of raw milk production also adversely affects the production of dairy products. Steady development of milk production depends primarily on increasing the intensity of resource use determined by scientific and technological progress and improving the organization of social production. Agricultural organizations have the greatest resource potential in this respect, rather than peasant (farmer) farms and household farms. In environmentally safe production of food, the use of mineral and organic fertilizers, the means for chemical crop protection against pests, diseases and weeds at the rates when there is no danger of pollution of the environment and especially groundwater is allowed. When evaluating the ecological state of arable soils of the Region, no excess of estimated concentrations is detected for any of the pollution elements. Most of the farmlands in the past two decades, under conditions of reduced or no chemogenic load have gone through a phase of natural self-cleaning. The Region has the resource potential for the development of ecologically safe dairy products. The main task of the state policy on this issue is to create conditions for effective work of commodity producers providing environmentally safe production. The realization of this task is closely connected with the action of necessary management mechanisms (legal, economic, organizational, credit and financial).