🇺🇿 The cattle breeds of Uzbekistan

Cattle keeping in Uzbekistan is a household affair: roughly three million cows, nearly all of them on small dehkan family plots. A cow there gives only about 1,600 kg of milk a year, close to the bottom for the CIS, and cattle also supply meat. Since the desert half of the country supports just sheep, cows share irrigated farm land with crops.

• About 3 million cows are kept in Uzbekistan, 95% of them on small dehkan family farms.
• A cow averages about 1,600 kg of milk a year, well below Russia, Ukraine or Moldova.
• Half of Uzbekistan is desert pasture, but those ranges carry sheep, not cattle.
• Expanding grain growing has taken land once used to grow fodder crops.
• Cattle rank with sheep and chickens among the country's meat animals.

Cattle in Uzbekistan

Cattle stand to one side of Uzbekistan's farm economy, which is built on irrigated cotton, wheat and orchards in its river valleys and oases. Half the land is given to farming, and crops and livestock must share it, while the vast desert pastures feed sheep alone. Cattle raising is therefore small in scale: about three million cows, kept mostly by families on their dehkan plots, a style of keeping that grew out of the private side of Soviet collective farms. Compared with Russia, Ukraine or Moldova, Uzbek cows give much less milk, a gap put down to poor feeding and a wariness among country people of artificial insemination, the technique used to upgrade breeds.

Regions and communities

In practice cattle stay close to the irrigated land. Cropping depends on watering and sits in river valleys and oases, and because the farming half of the country must serve crops and animals together, cows are kept in and around these settled zones. The desert pastures that stretch across half of Uzbekistan carry sheep alone, so the open ranges belong to sheep. Even Bukhara, the best known livestock name in the country, is famed for karakul sheep pelts rather than for cattle.

Milk, butter and beef

Milk and meat are the output. The herd of roughly three million cows yields about 1,600 kg of milk per animal each year, one of the weaker performances in the CIS, where Russia, Ukraine and Moldova average around 2,500 kg. Short rations and little use of breeding technology hold the figure down. Nearly all the milk comes from household cows, since family plots own almost every cow in the country. Meat completes the picture: cattle, sheep and chickens are the animals raised for it.

Today

About three million cows make up the national herd, and almost every one belongs to a household farm, with big firms owning just one cow in a hundred. Milk yields hover near 1,600 kg a year, held there by thin rations and hesitancy over artificial insemination. Government money and plans target cotton and its textile industry, and as grain growing spreads, fodder land has given way.