Celebrating our Kentucky Dairy Farmers on National Milk Day

It's National Milk Day! On this day in 1878, the first bottled milk was delivered. Be sure to drink a milk toast to America’s number one beverage.

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In honor of the day, we wanted to share a few Kentucky dairy industry facts: 

  • In 2014, Kentucky milk cows produced 115 million gallons of milk. 
  • Kentucky was home to 63,000 milk cows on 714 dairy farms as of January 1, 2015, with the average herd size being 88 milking cows. 
  • Kentucky’s dairy cows, on average, produced 5.8 gallons of milk each day. This meant each Kentucky dairy cow was producing enough milk to make 2.3 pounds of butter of 5 pounds of cheese!  
  • Kentucky milk is also processed locally; Kentucky has 7 commercial milk processing plants, 3 commercial cheese processing plants, a specialty ice-cream plant, 1 on-farm milk bottling plant, and 6 on-farm cheese makers. 

The top dairy cattle counties in the state:

  1. Barren
  2. Adair
  3. Logan
  4. Todd
  5. Christian 

Many thanks to Kentucky Farm Bureau for collecting this data from the National Agricultural Statistics Service. 

DairyJennifer Elwell