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EveryCow

🇲🇼 The cattle breeds of Malawi

No breeds of Malawi are on EveryCow yet. The catalogue grows every day.

Cattle in Malawi are kept alongside sheep and goats, yet they play a small part in a farming story told through crops. The fields grow maize, cassava, sweet potatoes and sorghum, while tobacco, tea, sugar and coffee bring in the money. Herding sits quietly at the edge of this crop-centred life.

  • Cattle are raised in Malawi together with sheep and goats, on the margins of a crop-led farm economy
  • Tobacco dominates exports: 175,000 tonnes were produced in 2011
  • In 1907 most Malawians farmed to feed their own households
  • Tea was first planted commercially in the Shire Highlands in 1905
  • Maize became a cash-crop export after the 1949 famine

Cattle in Malawi

Malawi, known as Nyasaland before independence in 1964, is a land of crop growers first and livestock keepers second. Most rural families have long farmed small plots to feed themselves, while the country's export earnings rest on tobacco, tea, sugar, cotton, groundnuts and coffee. Cattle are raised, though always listed alongside sheep and goats, and they take up a modest corner of the farming story. The forces that shaped Malawian agriculture were crops and land: staples such as maize, cassava and sweet potatoes, cash crops grown on European estates and by African smallholders, and a colonial past bound up with plantation labour and a rent system called thangata. Cattle keeping is a supporting thread in a system built around the field rather than the herd.

Where this page comes from

The facts in this overview come from the Wikipedia article "Agriculture in Malawi", written by its contributors and used under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. EveryCow rewrote the text in its own words, with AI assistance, and compares every page with the article to make sure no passage is copied. It may be reused under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 licence with a link back.

Cattle townFair or marketPastureRanch countrySanctuary or reserveCity
PurposeDairyBeefDraughtDual-purposeTriple-purposeSportCeremonialGrazingHeritageMiniature
LineageTaurineZebuSangaCompositeYakMithunBantengWild
TraitHeat-tolerantCold-hardyDrought-hardyDisease-resistantThrifty foragersDocileSpiritedQuick and strongPolledLong-hornedRich milkMarbled beefLong-livedEasy calving

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