Cattle herd hardly changed in Netherlands

The cattle herd in 2022 has remained virtually the same compared to a year earlier with 3.8 million cattle. The number of dairy goats increased slightly to almost 489 thousand. The size of the pig herd decreased by 1.6 percent to 11.3 million. The number of chickens also decreased; last year by 2.3 percent to 98 million. This is evident from provisional figures from the 2022 Agricultural Census of Statistics Netherlands. An increased cattle herd On 1 April 2022, there were 13.7 thousand (0.4 percent) more cattle than one year previously. This year there were 1.57 million dairy cows registered, the same number as last year. Young cattle for dairy farming, on the other hand, increased last year by 1.6 percent to 982 thousand. The number of veal calves fell by 0.4 percent to over 1 million animals. More land on average at dairy farms Dairy farms use 45 percent of the total cultivated area in the Netherlands. In 2022, a dairy farm had an average of 60 hectares of cultivated land. This ...