Food Science and Agriculture: Research Highlights Vol. 11

Goat milk connects smallholder livelihoods, specialised dairy processing and an expanding literature on nutritional functionality. These domains are frequently reviewed separately, encouraging assumptions that biological adaptability guarantees productive resilience or that distinctive composition establishes superior health outcomes. This critical narrative review integrates evidence on production systems, milk constituents, human nutrition, animal health, processing and environmental performance. Scholarly and institutional sources were examined for publications available through 29 July 2026, with emphasis on recent research, methodological transparency and the transferability of findings across breeds, environments and product categories. The evidence supports substantial variation in milk composition with genotype, lactation stage, feeding, udder health and processing. Protein fractionation, lipid profiling and oligosaccharide analysis increasingly resolve this variation, but analytical differences do not by themselves demonstrate clinically meaningful benefits. Trials of appropriately formulated goat-milk-based infant formula generally support satisfactory growth and tolerability in healthy infants; they neither validate unmodified goat milk as an infant feed nor establish suitability for cow's milk allergy. Production remains constrained by seasonal feed deficits, heat load, inadequate recording, infectious disease, limited veterinary support and uneven access to reliable milk collection. Improvements in animal performance may be lost through poor hygiene, inconsistent product quality, weak market coordination or unfavourable feed and energy costs. Environmental comparisons are similarly conditional on productivity, system boundaries, co-product allocation and assumptions about soil carbon. The synthesis identifies fit-for-purpose production and product evaluation, rather than a universal hierarchy of breeds or farming systems, as the appropriate organising principle. Immediate priorities are multi-farm longitudinal recording, context-specific feeding and health interventions, validated quality-control systems and transparent economic assessment. Longer-term work should link compositional traits to defined processing or clinical endpoints while testing the durability, affordability and distribution of benefits. Goat milk can contribute to diverse food systems, but its contribution depends on coordinated management and evidence-calibrated claims rather than intrinsic superiority.