Milk per animal
What you should know about this indicator
- This indicator is calculated by dividing the net production of milk by the number of animals used for milk production.
- In most countries, milk production is predominantly from cows, but the data includes milk from other species like sheep and goats.
- Net milk production refers to the total production of whole fresh milk, excluding the milk sucked by young animals but including the milked quantities used to feed livestock.
Related research and writing
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
How we process data at Our World in Data
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
- This indicator is calculated by dividing the total production of milk by the number of animals used for milk production.
Reuse this work
- All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
- All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.
Citations
How to cite this page
To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:
“Data Page: Milk per animal”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado and Max Roser (2023) - “Agricultural Production”. Data adapted from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/milk-yields-per-animal [online resource]
How to cite this data
In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Full citation
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Milk per animal – FAO” [dataset]. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “Production: Crops and livestock products” [original data]. Retrieved March 31, 2025 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/milk-yields-per-animal