Between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, the value of a Dutch cow quadrupled

Between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, the value of a Dutch cow quadrupled. The Dutch were starting to understand what best to feed cattle, as well as how best to cultivate pastureland. This led to an enormous increase in milk production in Friesland, Flanders, and Holland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Dutch cows were producing more than twice the yield of cows in neighbouring countries, and milk was more plentiful in the Netherlands than in most of Europe.

M. Kurlansky, Milk: a 10,000 year history (2018), 96