Supercow (also super cow or super-cow) is a term used in the

dairy industry A dairy is a place where milk is stored and where butter, cheese, and other dairy products are made, or a place where those products are sold. It may be a room, a building, or a larger establishment. In the United States, the word may also des ...

to denote lines or individual animals that have superior

milk Milk is a white liquid food produced by the mammary glands of lactating mammals. It is the primary source of nutrition for young mammals (including breastfeeding, breastfed human infants) before they are able to digestion, digest solid food. ...

production: that is, which produce more milk per day, or in some cases produce more fat per gallon of milk. Until recently, super-cows have been developed through

selective breeding Selective breeding (also called artificial selection) is the process by which humans use animal breeding and plant breeding to selectively develop particular phenotypic traits (characteristics) by choosing which typically animal or plant m ...

– either traditional breeding or, since the 1960s,

artificial insemination Artificial insemination is the deliberate introduction of sperm into a female's cervix or uterine cavity for the purpose of achieving a pregnancy through in vivo fertilization by means other than sexual intercourse. It is a fertility treatment ...

. Now the term tends to be applied to cows that have been genetically altered or whose genome has been studied in order to improve breeding. By 2023, according to a news report " many countries, including the United States, farmers breed clones with conventional animals to add desirable traits, such as high milk production or disease resistance, into the gene pool". In that year, Chinese scientists reported the cloning of three so called "super-cows" with a milk productivity "nearly 1.7 times the amount of milk an average cow in the United States produced in 2021" and a plan for 1,000 such super-cows in the near-term.{{cite news , last1=Gan , first1=Nectar , title=China says it successfully cloned 3 highly productive 'super cows' , url=https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/01/business/china-super-cow-cloning-intl-hnk-scn/index.html , access-date=17 February 2023 , work=CNN , date=2 February 2023 , language=en , archive-date=16 February 2023 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230216194639/https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/01/business/china-super-cow-cloning-intl-hnk-scn/index.html , url-status=live

References

Cattle Dairy farming Intensive farming Selection Applied genetics

See also

References