Got milk? China says it’s come up with a way to produce more milk. Scientists there claim to have successfully cloned three “super cow” calves that will be able to produce 50 percent more milk than American cows.

The cloning experiment started last year at the Northwest University of Agricultural and Forestry Science and Technology in Shaanxi, China. Using what’s called the somatic cell nuclear transfer method, scientists created embryos which were then placed inside surrogate cows. The scientists grafted three cows to produce the super cow.

The first calf was born healthy born on Dec. 30 by cesarean section due to its large size–120 pounds–an official in the city of Wulin in Ningxia told the state-run Technology Daily.

The calves will eventually produce 18 tons of milk per year, or 100 tons of milk in their lifetime, Chinese scientists estimated. By comparison, the average U.S. cow produces almost 12 tons of milk annually, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. 

Meat and milk from a cloned cow are just “as safe to eat as food from conventionally bred animals,” according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Northwest A&F bovine veterinarian Yaping Jin led the experiment. Jin told Global Times that his team’s experiment produced more than 100 cloned embryos that were implanted into surrogate cows with a pregnancy rate of about 18 percent after 200 days, CBS News reported.

The newly born cloned calves will be used to create a larger herd of super cows, Jin noted. 

So why is China cloning cows?

Only five in 10,000 cows in China can produce 100 tons of milk in their lifetimes, and as much as 70 percent of China’s dairy cows are imported from overseas, according to the Global Times.

“We plan to take two to three years to build up a herd of over 1,000 super cows, as a solid foundation to tackle China’s reliance on overseas dairy cows,” he said.

The calves were cloned from the highly productive Holstein Friesian breed, which originated in the Netherlands, CNN reported.

This isn’t the first time Chinese scientists have made news with cloning animals. In 2022, Chinese scientists cloned the world’s first arctic wolf.

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