As I just noted here, the Russian dairy herd has been suffering since at least the early 1930s thanks to collectivization. As a result, the country has turned more and more abroad for assistance, importing bulls to beef up its herd. In fact, last year, Russia brought in some 55,000 live cattle to help increase the cow population as well as overall dairy production.
As Laura Vozzella of the Washington Post points out,
Instead of raising dairy cattle for milk and beef cattle for meat, Soviet collective farms had “dual-use” cattle, which would be milked for a while, then killed for meat, [Valery Osipenko of Vistar Farms in Mechanicsville, Va.] said. Those one-size-fits-all cattle may have embodied an egalitarian ideal, but both milk and meat were mediocre, said Osipenko, a native of Ukraine who recalled his mother boiling beef for hours in a fruitless attempt to tenderize it.
And so American bulls are now coming over to mate with Russian cows. I only hope the cows are sincere and not just trying to get visas.