🇳🇿 The cattle breeds of New Zealand

New Zealand's cattle are, above all, dairy animals: grass-fed cows milked outdoors through most of the year. From the first Shorthorns brought ashore by a missionary in 1814 the herd has grown to nearly five million, placing the country among the top seven milk producers worldwide. Co-operatives dominate the trade, and a single giant processor sends most of the milk to buyers in more than 140 countries.

• Shorthorn cows reached the Bay of Islands in 1814, a gift from the governor of New South Wales.
• Edendale's plant takes in more milk than any other dairy factory in the world.
• On 1 June, Moving Day, herds and sharemilkers travel the roads to new farms.
• Bovine tuberculosis hides in possums; only twenty infected herds remained by 2017/18.
• New Zealand milks about 21 billion litres a season, most of it exported.

Cattle in New Zealand

Cattle keeping in New Zealand is, at heart, dairy keeping. The industry grew from Shorthorn cows landed for missionaries in 1814 into a pasture-fed business of almost five million animals, run through farmer co-operatives. In the early colonial years most settlements kept a few milking cows, families milking one or two apiece, with bigger herds near towns where milk and butter could be sold. Co-operative factories, an export board and eventually a single dominant processor shaped the modern sector. The industry leans on grass rather than barns, and on exports rather than home markets. Australia enters the story only as the place those first cows came from.

The breeds

New Zealand's dairy herd begins with one breed: the Shorthorn, then often called the Durham. In 1814 the missionary Samuel Marsden received the first cows as a gift from Lachlan Macquarie, governor of New South Wales, drawn from that colony's Crown herd. They reached his mission stations in the Bay of Islands. Shorthorns spread with the settlers, and by the mid-1840s most districts kept some for milking. On ordinary family farms a cow or two supplied the household, the milking done by women and children. Larger herds clustered near towns, where fresh milk and butter found buyers.

Regions and communities

Dairying first flourished where rain was dependable: Waikato and Taranaki, the West Coast, plus Bay of Plenty, Manawatū, Nelson and Tasman. Irrigation has since carried cows into drier country, and Canterbury and Otago now milk as well. Weather has redrawn the map before: when Cyclone Bola hit in 1988, many Taranaki farms switched over to dairying. The industry's great factories rose inside these districts, close to the herds that supply them.

Milk, butter and beef

Before refrigerated ships arrived in the 1880s, butter and cheese were made on the farm and sold through local stores; factories then appeared in nearly every dairying village. Today a season yields about 21 billion litres of milk carrying 1.9 million tonnes of protein and milkfat, most of it exported to more than 140 countries, with China the largest single buyer since the 2010s. The four biggest plants in the Southern Hemisphere stand at Edendale and Te Rapa, Whareroa by Hāwera, and Clandeboye by Timaru, and Edendale takes in more milk than any other factory in the world.

Festivals, fairs and faith

The dairy calendar has one celebrated date: 1 June, the first day of the farming year. Once called Gypsy Day, and now usually Moving Day, or Mooving Day as a pun, it sends sharemilkers and contract milkers on the road with their families, herds and gear to begin contracts on new farms. Calving follows soon after, in late winter and early spring, and the season closes when the cows are dried off, rested from milking, in April and May.

Today

Almost five million cows put New Zealand among the top ranks of milk nations; it supplies about 3% of the world's milk, ranking seventh. A co-operative formed by mergers in 2001 now handles around 82% of the milk solids, while one of the last two independents was bought by a Chinese group in 2019. Herds have been tested by tuberculosis carried by possums and by a bacterial disease that arrived in 2017, and campaigners keep pressing the industry over rivers, emissions and land conversion.