Dairy Cattle Production

Every sachet of fresh milk sold at a roadside stall in Vom or Bokkos, and every tin of milk powder on a Lagos supermarket shelf, traces back to one animal doing one job: a dairy cow converting grass and feed into milk, day after day, for months at a stretch. Dairy cattle production is the deliberate management of cattle for that single purpose, and it looks nothing like keeping cattle for beef or for draught work.

In this lesson you will meet the two breeds that dominate the topic, the high-yielding exotic Friesian and the hardy indigenous White Fulani, and learn why Nigerian dairy farmers usually keep neither one alone but a cross of the two. You will work through the feeding, milking and calving routines that keep a dairy herd productive, the real factors that make one cow's yield far higher than another's, and finish with the kind of milk-yield calculation WAEC sets almost every year.