Whilst dairy yields have exploded, the land used by cattle in total in the UK has remained stagnant (has it?). Dairy cattle are producing more milk per cow, so we have less of them. That requires less land, so why aren't we using less land?

• Fewer dairy cows means we don't have as many "by-product" cows from dairy farms that we can eat. This means we have to graze more cows for beef
• Part of the dairy cow yield improvements come from feeding them grains which require land to grow.

As detailed in: https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/can-britain-feed-itself a 63 per cent increase in milk yield results in a mere five per cent increase in land productivity.

AI suggested related notes

These notes appear semantically similar based on Smart Connections embeddings:

• Animal agriculture takes up lots of land but provide few calories (similarity: 66.4%)
• Land use change, rewilding, grazing and rainforests (similarity: 62.9%)
• UK farmland use (similarity: 62.7%)