🇮🇱 The cattle breeds of Israel

Cattle play a modest part in Israel's farming, which leans on crops and poultry, but its dairy herds are highly productive. Cows of the Israel-Holstein breed give some of the highest milk yields per animal in the world, and all the milk drunk in the country is produced at home. Beef is a small share of the meat eaten.

• Israeli cows averaged 10,035 kg of milk each in 2010, second in the world to Saudi Arabia.
• Israel-Holsteins, valued for yield and disease resistance, form the bulk of most dairy herds.
• Israeli cows produced 1.6 billion litres of milk in 2023.
• All milk drunk in Israel comes from dairy farms within the country.
• Poultry supplies two-thirds of Israel's meat, 85% of it from moshav farms.

Cattle in Israel

Israeli farming is built on ingenuity with water and on export crops, and cattle stand a little apart from that story. The dairy cow is the livestock that counts: herds are founded largely on the Israel-Holstein, and all the milk drunk in the country comes from home dairy farms. Beef cattle hardly feature, because poultry supplies two-thirds of the meat eaten and meat is among the imports. Cattle keeping sits inside the cooperative pattern of the kibbutz, a collective village, and the moshav, where families farm their own land but market together. In milk per cow, Israel vies with Saudi Arabia at the top of world tables.

The breeds

The Israel-Holstein is the country's own dairy cow, described as a heavy yielder that resists disease, and it makes up the bulk of most herds. Under Israeli management it sets striking figures: cows averaged about 10,000 litres of milk each in 2010, bettered that year only in Saudi Arabia. The breed serves the home dairy industry, while beef animals take no comparable place, since poultry and imported meat fill the national table.

Milk, butter and beef

Milk is the great cattle product: Israeli cows turned out 1.6 billion litres in 2023, enough to cover all the milk the country drinks. The export story in dairy belongs to sheep rather than cows, since it is sheep milk that is sold abroad. Beef is a quiet corner of the market. Poultry supplies two-thirds of the meat Israelis eat, most of it from moshav farms, and meat overall figures among the country's agricultural imports. Dairy farming thus serves the home table first.

Today

Dairy cows remain world leaders in output per animal, ahead of every country except Saudi Arabia in the 2010 comparison, and the national herd gave 1.6 billion litres in 2023. Farming as a whole has shrunk to about 2.5% of the economy, though production grew by 26% from 1999 to 2009 even as farmer numbers fell and water use dropped. The upheavals of late 2023, when many foreign farm workers left or were taken, strained farms of every kind, dairy included.