EU reports fall in cattle herd as global figures grow
Newly released statistics from the European Commission put the European Union’s cattle herd in 2025 at 71.6 million head.
The Commission said that the total number of cattle across the 27 member states had fallen by 0.4% compared to 2024. However, it also pointed out that in the course of the ten years leading up to 2025, the EU’s cattle herd declined by 9.7%.
Eurostat, the European Union's official statistics office, has adjusted its baseline figures for comparisons like these to exclude figures for the UK, which left the EU in 2020.
These figures for the EU are in line with statistics that the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has published, although the FAO figures only go up to 2024.
Between 2015 and 2024, the FAO figures suggest a fall in the cattle herd in the 27 member-states of the EU from 79.7 million head to 71.9 million. This represents a decline of 9.8% across that timeframe.
Globally, though, the FAO stats mean the world’s cattle herd has increased substantially over the same period. There are notable gaps in the FAO statistics; for example, it includes no official figures for India, only third-party estimates. It says its figure for the global herd size in 2024 is also an estimate.
It puts the figure at nearly 1.6 billion head. Compared to 2015, this represents an increase of 8.7%.
Image: Cheick Saidou/agriculture.gouv.fr
