🇹🇭 The cattle breeds of Thailand

Cattle keep a quiet place in Thai farming, where rice, sugarcane, rubber and cassava dominate and most farms are small. Their clearest role is milk: Thailand turns out about a million tonnes of raw milk a year and leads ASEAN in dairy, with a national School Milk Programme anchoring demand.

• Thai dairy farmers can supply about 2,800 tonnes of raw milk a day, over a million tonnes a year
• The agriculture ministry ranks Thailand first in ASEAN for dairy output and exports
• Two-fifths of Thailand's milk goes to the School Milk Programme, the rest to commerce
• The School Milk Programme began in 1985 after farmers protested over milk left unsold
• About six in ten of Thailand's 13 million farmers grow rice on nearly half the farmland

Cattle in Thailand

Thailand farms intensively and competitively, with rice as the anchor: about six in ten of its thirteen million farmers grow it, on close to half the cultivated land. Holdings are small, mostly under eight hectares, and nearly all use machinery. Cattle hold a modest place in this landscape. Their clearest presence is dairying: the country milks at a rate of roughly 2,800 tonnes a day, and its agriculture ministry calls it the leading dairy nation in ASEAN by output and exports alike. A national school milk scheme, created after farmers protested over unsold milk, anchors demand at home. Beyond the dairy herd, cattle play a small part in a farm economy centred on crops such as sugarcane, cassava, rubber and palm oil.

Milk, butter and beef

Milk is the cattle product with a firm foothold. Thai dairy farmers can supply about 2,800 tonnes of raw milk each day, a little over a million tonnes across a year, on 2015 figures. Two-fifths of that flow is bought for the national School Milk Programme; the remainder goes to the commercial dairy trade. The scheme was designed as market support: it gives farmers an outlet for milk that might otherwise go unsold, and it gets children drinking milk early, building tomorrow's customers. Elsewhere in the export ledger, rice leads, with chicken, sugar, canned tuna and shrimp prominent too.

Today

Dairy has grown into a sizeable industry: the agriculture ministry ranks Thailand first in ASEAN for making dairy goods and for selling them abroad. The School Milk Programme, running since 1985, still absorbs two-fifths of output. The wider setting is strained: farms are tiny and mechanised, the farming population is ageing, research budgets have fallen, and farm households owe heavy debts, some to loan sharks. Cattle keeping sits inside that pressured, competitive farm economy rather than apart from it.