Number of dairy cows in the Netherlands 2000-2021

A stereotypical image of the Dutch countryside would quite likely consist of flat, green meadows filled with horses, sheep and of course the world-famous black-and-white cows. And there is some truth to each stereotype: there were an impressive cows in the Netherlands in 2021, or almost one-tenth of the country’s human population.

 Scaling up in dairy farming 

  In 2021, just over farms owned dairy cows, a considerable decrease in comparison to a decade ago, when there were still over farms with dairy cows. In the same period however, the number of cows per farm increased significantly. Whereas in 2009 the average Dutch farm had dairy cows, by 2021 this had grown to . So although the number of farms decreased, the remaining farms had more cows to take care of.

Dairy cows in the Benelux countries

  The importance of the Netherlands in dairy farming becomes even more obvious when comparing the number of dairy cows in the country to the other Benelux countries, Belgium and Luxembourg. There were over dairy cows in the Benelux, but three quarters of these cows were Dutch. In comparison, in Belgium there were just under dairy cows in 2021.