Five born every minute...

There are around 8 million cattle of all ages in Great Britain, with another couple of million in Northern Ireland. We'll stick to GB, as it's very easy to be VERY accurate about every single one of those lovely bovine beauties, as each and every one will have two ear tags, with their own unique ID number, and they all have their own little passport too which details their DOB, where they were born, their mum's ID, dad's occupation (well, breed at least) and everywhere they've been to. OK, the odd cow might have lost an eartag, and the occasional calf might not be tagged within the first week of life (which, legally they should be) - but I reckon the up-to-date census of cows in our green and pleasant land will be a lot more accurate than it might be for people.

That's largely thanks to the BSE crisis of the late 80s/ early 90s. Ever since, not a birth, a death, a movement or sex change (yep, cows transition too - usually when an overtired farmer didn't notice the little dangly bits on first inspection) can go unrecorded with the Cattle Tracing System (CTS). I suspect we have the most robust cattle recording system in the World. Eradicating BSE was a success story for the UK. The fact we had it in the first place, less so - but that's a story for another day.

There are 2.7 million calves born each year...5 born every minute. If you're familiar with the phrase "one born every minute", which applies to human babies in the UK, you'll know that this means there are around five times as many calf births as human baby births. When you consider all the maternity care and post-natal care that goes into human baby-making, that's a pretty marvellous statistic. Hats off to all the farmers who do all that midwifery whilst juggling lots of other jobs (and to the vets, who offer their round the clock assistance for whenever it gets a bit tricky, which is invariably at an ungodly hour of the night!).

Now, at first glance, it might look like I've done my sums wrong. I mean, we all know that there are around 60 million humans in Britain, yet I've said there's only 8 million cattle - how come there are five times the number of calves compared to human babies? Dig a little deeper and you'll see.

Breaking down the figures, there are about 1.5 million adult breeding dairy cows, and a similar number of adult suckler cows. Adult, in cow terms, means two years old and above. That's when they start having babies. A suckler cow, by the way, is one who isn't milked; they produce just beef calves. Their calves suckle their mums for 6-8 months, are weaned, and then are mainly slaughtered as "prime beef" sometime before they reach 2-2.5 years old. Most suckler cows are dairy cross beef, but some are purebred beef breeds such as Limousin, Charolais, Hereford or an Aberdeen Angus - or a Highland cow (everyone knows what they look like at least). Suckler herds, therefore, differ from dairy herds where the production is two-fold: milk, and also beef.

It can get a bit complicated, all the different types of cows and different breeds, but I've created a graphic which attempts to simplify how all the 8 million cattle are distributed. Whether in the world of Suckler or Dairy, there are far fewer adult breeding males than females. You only need one bull for every 30-40 cows or so. And for dairy cows, many are mated with artificial insemination. In this case, the bulls live a pampered life in special bull studs, and their semen is collected (again, a story for another day), divided up hundreds if not thousands of times, frozen, transported to the dairy farm and later inseminated into a cow in heat. So you don't need many bulls at all to meet the dairy cows' needs.

Coming back to the maths then, there are relatively more breeding females in the cow world than in the human world, they start having babies at just two years old, and crucially, they have about one baby per year. Then, on top of that, there aren't many older cows which stay behind if they're not making new pregnancies. They go for beef too. Likewise the old bulls. That's how a population of around just 3 million cows result in nearly as many baby calves born every year, compared with a human adult female population of around 23 million which produces just 0.6 million babies each year (a mere 3%). By the way, if you're wondering if twins makes any difference to these numbers, yes they do a bit. Around 3% of births result in twins for cattle; this is slightly more than humans where it is about one in sixty births.

Now all things being equal, if there are about 2.7 million new calves being born each year, it stands to reason that (assuming we have a reasonably stable population, which we do) there are around 2.7 million cattle that pass over to the other side each year too. In the main, that happens at the abattoir, rather than expiring by natural causes. And this is the beef industry.

Most beef is what is known as "prime beef". That is fully grown cattle, killed at around one and half to two and half years old, and consisting of youngstock which have been reared from the dairy herd and ones which have been reared from the beef suckler herd. It's about a 50:50 ratio actually. Then on top of that, about 0.8 million adult breeding cattle also go into the beef supply chain each year. For dairy cows, they'll typically be 5-8 years old, and for suckler cows, typically 7-10 years old. That's middle-aged for a cow, I'd say. I think sometimes the dairy industry gets a bit of stick for "ruining cows" so they have to be slaughtered young. In fact, it's more that the dairy cow is always a dual purpose animal really, and she is more valuable for beef whilst she is still reasonably fit and young, than if she is allowed to become old and possibly a bit too chewy.

I'm not here in this blog to staunchly defend everything about the status quo however, and it is true that in my opinion some dairy herds don't look after their cows well enough, and they do end up culling too many too young. Or worse still, cows are culled, or even die, because they have become lame, or injured, or have a severe udder infection (mastitis), or have developed some other problem after calving, when really if they had been better managed and looked after, that may not have happened. These are known as "involuntary culls". Thanks to the CTS, it is possible to be very accurate about these too for every farm, as their death is recorded as "on farm".

That'll do for now. I just wanted to set out the broad basics of the cattle demographics in Britain. There's some things to come back to at another time perhaps, such as how many cattle farms there are, where they all are (Devon has the most, followed by Cumbria and then SW Wales, if you want a heads-up), what a typical herd size looks like, where all the different types of beef ends up, what we import, why we have different breeds etc. But we've had enough stats for one day!

In next week's post, I'll take you into the amazing world of the cow's four stomachs. Please remember to subscribe if you'd like to receive email notifications each time I post a blog.