How much milk would an ancient milking cow produce compared to a modern cow? Is there any data or information regarding historical dairy production compared to modern production? How different would an ancient dairy cow be physically and in terms of production compared to a modern cow?

by cowquestions

I was thinking about the value of products like butter, cheese, and milk and how much more valuable they might have been in ancient times with less dairy production. I tried googling an answer but couldn't find much on the topic. I'm also interested to know what physical changes have been made through breeding, evolution, etc. in the cow over time and how an ancient cow might compare to one today on a typical dairy farm.

wotan_weevil

I don't know of any reliable ancient dairy production statistics. However, modern statistics are available for traditional dairy industries with traditional breeds, and traditional health care and feed.

Two examples:

  1. Ethiopia: 1.5 litres per day (Amistu, K. et al., "Assessment of Traditional Dairy Production, Milk Marketing and Processing System: In the Case of Alle Woreda, Segen Peoples Zone, Southern Ethiopia", Journal of Marketing and Consumer Research 24, 41-47, 2016)

  2. India: 2.4 litres per day (table 7, M. Landes et al., "India’s Dairy Sector: Structure, Performance, and Prospects", Economic Research Service Report LDPM-272-01, USDA, 2017)

The world average is about 6 litres per cow, similar to the Indian average for modern breeds (typically crossbreeds between indigenous breeds and Western improved breeds), 7.1 litres per day (Landes, table 6). The 20 countries with the highest productivities vary from about 16 litres per day to 27.

From this, with reasonable amounts of feed, milk productivity is about 2.5 litres per day with traditional non-improved breeds (high yielding regions in Ethiopia reach this productivity), and with poor feed, perhaps half of this (or even lower, depending on how short of feed the cattle are). Modern improved breeds will increase this by 2.5 to 3 times, even under similar conditions. With modern factory farming, this can be increased by a further 2-4 times.

This comparison between modern traditional-style farming with traditional breeds, traditional farming with improved breeds, and modern factory farming invites the question of how similar modern traditional breeds are to ancient breeds. The low poor-condition cows (yields of about 1.5 litres per day) manage to feed a calf (note that this 1.5 litres per day is an average over the year, and the calf drinks more than that per day while milk is its sole food). However, the calves would prefer more milk, and would grow faster if their mothers had better feed and produced more milk. Therefore, a reasonable assumption is that ancient milk yields were similar to these modern traditional-breed yields.