Abstract In the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the sown area of watermelon in recent years does not exceed 85 thousand hectares, although in the early 90s it was almost 132 thousand hectares, 2/3 of these areas are located in the southern regions. One of the key problems of industrial cucurbit crops production is the transition of production from large-scale agricultural enterprises to small-scale private farms, the share of which today is more than 90%. At the same time, the transfer of production to the private sector provides additional profits for small producers and can be almost the only source of their income. The scientific originality of the paper is determined by the fact that the current situation indicates that the private farms have turned out to be more adapted to the specifics of market relations. Without considerable capital investments, using production technologies that are less dependent on the rise in the price of energy carriers and other material and technical resources, agricultural producers increase the output volume. The transition to the cultivation of cucurbit crops in households and small farms led to an increase in the separation of the real manufacturer from scientific achievements, the latest technologies, high-quality seeds, significantly limited the opportunities for the development of this industry.

Abstract Functional nutrition is the use in everyday life of products of natural or artificial origin, which have a regulatory effect on the physiological functions, biochemical reactions of a person through the normalization of his microecological status. Cow remains a common raw material for yoghurts. In this article, the milk of small ruminants is considered as a raw material. The functionality of yogurt, shelf life, survival of bacteria in in vitro conditions are being studied. The purpose of the article is to identify the number of live microorganisms in terms of storage from - days, and in vitro conditions. Therefore, we chose the second method in order to study the viability of probiotics in the developed yogurts from sheep and goat milk, by modeling the gastrointestinal tract in vitro in comparison with the information available in the scientific literature. The studies were carried out in two stages: the stage of activation and preparation of strains, the second stage of modeling the gastrointestinal tract and checking at each stage of digestion. In this study, there were 8 samples, all samples showed a constant number of viable cells during 14 days of storage, even at 21 days there were viable bacteria. The number of viable cells was maintained at 107 and 106 CFU/mL until the 21st day of storage at 4 °C. The difference between BB counts may be related to its sensitivity to oxygen. Based on the experimental data obtained, it can be concluded that the samples showed a good initial concentration of probiotics - above 1010 CFU/g, after activation, as well as after simulating passage through the gastrointestinal tract with an average decrease of 106 and 107 CFU/g, which proves the therapeutic ability yoghurts from sheep's milk obtained according to the claimed method.