Roughly speaking, in the 11 200 or so milk farms in Finland, there is one cow for every 19 inhabitants of Finland. (The total Finnish population is 5.35 million inhabitants). The dominant milk cow is the Ayrshire, with around 70% but Holstein cows are also numerous, numbering roughly 29%. About 1% is made up of different Finnish Cattle breeds such as the Western Finnish Cattle and the Eastern Finnish Cattle.

The number of dairy cattle farms has been clearly dwindling, as in 1991, one could still count around 40 000 farms. Most of today's farms are relatively small and efficient, with a herd size of about 23 cows being the average At the end of 2012, there were around 9 315
Finnish milk farms, while at the end of 2019, this number had dwindled to less than 6000 farms.

Cow Milk Production in Finland
Milk production has been on an on-going slight decline (some 2.29 million litres were produced in 2007), but the year 2009 marked a shift as the total production surpassed that of the previous year, reaching 2.26 million litres.

In 2008, a typical Finnish cow produced on the average 7 700 litres of milk per year, representing a 7.4% increase from 2001. In 2011, a Finnish cow could be expected to produce 7 900 litres of milk annually.
Around 40% of the milk goes into cheese production.

Around the year 2010, there were occasional shortages of milk, which lead to an increase in its retail prices. The retail price per litre of milk at the end of 2009 was around 80 cents. In the same year, milking cow farmers were receiving an average of 35 cents/litre for milk of average composition. At the end of 2012, the retail price of milk litre had risen to nearly 90 cents only to come down to around 80 cents per litre in 2020.