THE FRENCH DAIRY SECTOR IN 2025: MAJOR TRENDS AND STATISTICS

An active participant at the Cheese and Dairy Products Show, the National Interprofessional Centre for the Dairy Economy (CNIEL) was created in 1973 by cow's milk producers and processors in order to better share diagnoses, build common benchmarks and carry out collective actions designed in the interest of all stakeholders.

The 2025 edition of its report ‘The dairy economy in figures’ provides a synoptic overview of cow's milk production in France, with some key figures presented below. Cow's milk in France today represents:

• 44,242 farms delivering milk An average of 72 cows per farm
• 23 billion litres collected and processed at 740 sites
• An average price paid to the farm of €0.461/litre

Reading this document also gives an idea of the scale of change in production methods over the last quarter of a century. While production remains at a comparable level (23 billion litres of milk produced today as in 2000), the number of farms has decreased (44,242 farms delivering milk in 2023 compared to 120,406 in 2000), as has the number of head of cattle in the national herd (3.16 million dairy cows in 2023 compared to 4.32 million in 2000). This logically leads to other major developments: a significant increase in the average herd size per farm (72 cows today compared to only 36 in 2000) and increased average milk yield per cow (7,359 litres per year today compared to 5,358 in 2000).

It should also be mentioned that with 8,520 farms, more than 650,000 dairy cows and production of over 5 billion litres per year, Brittany remains the leading region in France in this field, ahead of Normandy and the Pays de la Loire.

But here too, considerable changes have occurred in recent years, as shown by this map from the report.