Word.ws English Dictionary

cowkeeper

cowkeeper noun: a smallholder who keeps one or several milk cows to fulfill household needs and earn some sales but is not a dairyer in the sense of running a herd of dozens or hundreds.

Noun

cowkeeper (plural cowkeepers)

  1. (especially Mauritius) A smallholder who keeps one or several milk cows to fulfill household needs and earn some sales but is not a dairyer in the sense of running a herd of dozens or hundreds.
    • Utilisation of sugarcane tops / Although some cane tops have always been used as a roughage feed, particularly in the past by smallholder cowkeepers, they are probably the most underutilised of all sugarcane by-products. Options for the use of cane tops are feeding as fresh material; ensiling fresh...1982, Booker Agriculture International Limited, Mauritius Sugarcane By-products Study: Main Report, United Nations Industrial Development Organization, page 17
    • During the last decade, the Ministry of Agriculture introduced a series of incentives in order to increase milk production at the smallholder level. One of these incentives was the Milk Productivity Bonus Scheme that was introduced in 1993. It had the twin objectives of encouraging dairy...2003, Geerjanand Saraye, Rafik Fakim, “Impact of the Milk Productivity Bonus Scheme (1993-1998) on Calving Interval”, in Agricultural Research and Extension Unit reports, Réduit, Mauritius: Food and...
  2. (archaic) A cowherd; a cowman; a dairyer.

Forms of cowkeeper

pluralcowkeepers

Origin of cowkeeper

From cow + keeper.

Questions about cowkeeper

What does cowkeeper mean?
Cowkeeper means a smallholder who keeps one or several milk cows to fulfill household needs and earn some sales but is not a dairyer in the sense of running a herd of dozens or hundreds.
What part of speech is cowkeeper?
Cowkeeper is a noun.
What is the plural of cowkeeper?
The plural of cowkeeper is cowkeepers.

Words near cowkeeper in the dictionary

  1. Cowins
  2. cowish
  3. cowitch
  4. cowives
  5. cowjuice
  6. cowkeeper
  7. cowkeepers
  8. cowkid
  9. cowkids
  10. cowkind
  11. cowkini

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cowkeeper (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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