now covers more than of Wales. The horticultural products most widely-grown organically include potatoes, brassicas and salad crops. Welsh organic milk is marketed as well as organic cheeses and yoghurts. Livestock farming Dairying is only economic in Wales with a sufficiently large herd in a productive lowland area. Hand-milking a few cows in a byre is a thing of the past and nowadays herds are milked by machine in modern parlours, two or three times a day. The milk passes by pipeline to the cooler and is stored in a refrigerated bulk tank and collected by milk tanker daily. In general, the cows graze outdoors in summer and spend their winter under cover, often in cubicles, the bulk of their feed being silage. Milk prices barely cover the costs of production, margins are tight, and there are fewer family-run dairy farms each year. In 2014, there were 1855 milk-producers in Wales, an annual decline of 1.23% since 2011, but the number of cows milked was nearly static at 223,000. Lowland livestock farms concentrate largely on beef cattle and various breeds of sheep, but there are also small units producing rarer animals including goats, deer, alpaca, guanaco, llama, buffalo and ostrich, as well as specialised pig and poultry farms. Most cattle are now housed in winter with their main feed being silage. Systems adopted include suckler cows, where the calf is reared by its mother, and the buying in, and growing on, of young beef cattle. Some of these are crossbred calves, a by-product of the dairy industry, where the dairy cow is put to a Charolais, Limousin, Angus, Hereford or similar beef bull. Many of these "stores" are later sold to other parts of the United Kingdom for fattening. The beef sector in Wales is in slow decline; in 2011 there were some 220,000 beef cattle aged over two years in Wales. Upland and hill farms provide grazing for hardy breeds of cattle like Welsh Blacks and for Welsh Mountain sheep. The cattle are normally housed in winter and may graze the open hillside in summer. The trampling of their hooves helps control bracken and they feed on a wide range of vegetation and on coarse tufts of grass that sheep cannot tackle. The sheep are mostly "hefted" on the unfenced open hillside all year round. Here they know their way around, know where to graze at different times of