US States With Most Milk Cows
Number of Cows: ~1.7 million Highlights: Leads in milk production and dairy exports, with nearly 45% of its milk supply used for cheese.
By Abd UllahPublished about a year ago • 4 min read
- By 1930, there were already 3.6 million dairy farms remaining, while today there are only 37,000.
- Milk cows can be simply referred to as da
- iry cattle or dairy cows, that are kept for high volume milk production for production of dairy products and raw milk sold in the market.
California, Wisconsin, and Idaho have the largest number of milk cows.
More than half of Americans consume milk mainly because it provides a high amount of protein in the diet. Dairy Production In The US
The dairy business is currently one of the most successful industries in the US. The size of the market for dairy production in the US is $41 billion, with industry employment of just under 140,000 people working in 39,617 businesses to produce raw milk for supply. 37,000 are farms, way less the number it was in 1930, which reached up to 3.6 million farms. California, Wisconsin, and Idaho have the highest milk cows not only in this country but the whole world. In the year 2019, the world's production of milk reached 513.22 million metric tons, second to the US with over 99 million metric tons - a 0.4% increase from the 2018 total of the country. Amongst these, California and Wisconsin alone supplied 70 million metric tonnes. US exports 14.5% of milk it produced and the biggest consumers of the same are Mexico, Southeast Asia and Canada. Milk Cows
Other term: Dairy cattle or dairy cow they are animals raised to produce large volumes of milk for production of dairy products and raw milk for sale. These are tame and intelligent animals who, it has been proved, produce up to 5% more milk-that is the equivalent of an additional liter a day or an extra 258 liters a year-if they are called by their names. However, with fewer dairy farms than before and lots of modern age technologies like artificial insemination and milking regimes, plus hormones and even drugs, the cows today produce 4 times the amount of milk compared to those of 1950, who were milked naturally. It is easily seen, that dairy farming is a competitive and demanding business, as well observed in the hard times of the top three states, that represent the milk production industry in the US. But as the following illustration demonstrates, winning at the top of this industry comes very high, in every sense of that term. The explanation for why "Happy cows come from California"-all 1,725,000 of them, or almost one in five milk cows in the US-is that most milk cows are controlled by almost 1,500 family farms which care about each cow's well-being. Some 40% of US dairy comes from California. In addition, cheese is made from the 45% of California's total milk supply.
Although open pastures and year-round warm weather in this state, provide ample grazing for the cattle, scientific evidence exists that greater than the tolerable threshold of exposure to heat results in harm to the lives and the milk produced by future generations from those cows.
More specific, calves born to cows that heavily grazed in high temperatures during gestation were smaller, generating less milk, and lived shorter lives.
2. Wisconsin
Wisconsin is also known as America's Dairyland with over 7,000 farms and 1,263,000,000 milk cows. It's still recovering from when the economic forces caused the milk prices to fall in 2018 all around the US, due to an over-production of milk. This, in turn, resulted in one of the prime struggling farms closing down due to its inability to bear the imbalance in cost-benefit. This comes as no surprise, because a farm with (only) 100 milk cows can cost over $600,000 per year to maintain, while the profit may not even reach $20,000.
All costs listed above include feeding cattle, hired man to do all milking twice a day, transporting the milk to retailers, and minor repairs to the equipment and the buildings. Yet without that investment, which, unhappily became the choice for some farmers to declare the farm dysfunctional and change their lifestyle, get out of the industry and go find another job.
Idaho's dairy production is split up into three milk-sheds that maintain all 635,000 of the state's milk cows: The Magic Valley, The Treasure Valley, and The Eastern Idaho; with the first one maintaining around 3/5 of all the state's dairies and 3/4 of all its milk cows. As of this May, Idaho produced 1,410 million pounds of milk, a 4.8% increase from the same time, last year. It is also one of the major US producers of cheese, annually producing more than 700,000,000 pounds of cheese. A third-ranking producer in US' dairy industry in terms of milk cows, Idaho boasts that its dairy farming provides more than 37,000 jobs, 85-90% of which are held by foreign-born workers. Still, of these, approximately 8,000 are in dairy production, 4,000 in processing, and the rest in supporting businesses.
A Challenging Business
Many farmers don't know how much money they'll make until the milk is actually sold, which may take a few weeks after it's transported from the farm. Some of them must delay repairs, and try to produce even greater amounts of milk - stressing the cows, or using the above-mentioned methods for increased milk production.
Another bad aspect of surplus milk is that when the milk price is coming down, farmers get an even lesser return while working much harder. Even the rather well-off farmers are thinking very carefully about their lifestyle choices since the prediction currently holds that the economic market for dairy will not improve fast enough to meet the multiplying demands of dairy farm-keeping.
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