A dairy cow from Canada has smashed agricultural records by selling for $1.2 million at an auction in Toronto – but the three-year-old Holstein called Missy has already repaid her new owners more than twice that sum.

 

With flawless pedigree and genetics, Missy can produce up to 50 percent more milk than the average cow, around 50 kilograms a day.

But her real value to her new owners, investors from the U.S. and Denmark, will be her embryos. Experts say Missy could have more than 70 calves in the course of her lifetime. She has already generated around $3.2 million in presigned contracts, according to the Toronto Globe and Mail.

“You don’t run across these kind of cows very often in your lifetime,” said Morris Thalen, the owner of Morsan Farms Ltd., where Missy will continue to be raised. “She did all the right things, and that just adds to her value.”

Missy is just the fifth cow in North America, all Holsteins, to crack the $1 million barrier but there is a growing appreciation of the value of high quality cattle, despite tumbling prices for standard cows in recent years.

Farmers “want to milk better cows, and this is how they’re getting them,” Holstein Journal publisher Peter English told the Toronto Globe and Mail. “Even guys that really didn’t give three hoots and a rain barrel about the purebred business five or 10 years ago, they’re seeing the possibility and potential in keeping better cattle.”

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