Holstein Cow Sells For $270K At World Dairy Expo

It’s not often that someone’s proverbial cash cow is an actual bovine, but a Holstein cow fetched $270,000 at the World Dairy Expo in Madison last Friday.

While a regular lactating cow might sell for a couple thousand dollars, the Holstein known as 9882 is well known in the dairy breeding world.

“She has about the highest (genetic value) for her age,” said Ethan Steiner from Pine Tree Dairy, 9882’s seller at the expo. “The thing that made her unique is that she’s been transmitting a lot of high offspring and she makes a lot of embryos so those two factors make the ability to return investment on her pretty good.”

Pine Tree originally bought 9882 for around $70,000, but the impressive genetics of the offspring she’s produced in the last year has increased her value, Steiner said.

Sales such as this are pretty unusual, but they have happened in the past.

“It’s about as rare as expensive pieces of art or things like that,” said Kent Weigel, Chair of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Dairy Science Department. “It doesn’t happen every day, but it happens occasionally.”

Weigel said advances in genomic testing mean breeders can have a lot of confidence in an animal’s ability to produce prized offspring, upping the prices for certain animals to previously unheard levels.