“The United States has been the world’s largest supplier of cattle genetics since at least 1992. In 2022, the US exported $295 million in bovine semen, 47 percent of the world’s exports. Few countries even come close to this market share: the next biggest exporters are Canada at 14 percent and the Netherlands at seven.

America’s cows are now extraordinarily productive. In 2024, just 9.3 million cows will produce 226 billion pounds of milk (about 100 million tons) – enough milk to provide ten percent of 333 million insatiable Americans’ diets, and export for good measure.

And that’s despite the fact that none of the cattle breeds the US exports are indigenous to the country. The world’s most popular dairy cow breed, the Holstein-Friesian, hails from the border between the Netherlands and Germany; the Jersey and Guernsey dairy breeds both originate from islands in the English Channel.

In many low-income countries, livestock products, including dairy cows, are critical for providing both nutrition and farming livelihoods. As a result, the US’s role in the global livestock genetics market lends it an outsize role not only in the genetic improvement of cattle but as an arbiter of rural development worldwide.

How did the US achieve this? In a word: data. This is the story of how the power of big data, combined with an ambitious public-private partnership between dairy farmers and the US Department of Agriculture, enabled the US to engineer the modern dairy cow and transform the dairy industry.”

From Works in Progress.