Intensive livestock farming is also highly developed in the South, which ranks first in the ranking of Brazilian milk production. Some of the milk produced in the South benefits from the dairy industries. The South has 35.7% of the Brazilian milk production, competing with the Southeast (which was the largest producer until 2014), which has 34.2%. The southeast has the largest herd of cows milked: 30.4% of the total of 17.1 million existing in Brazil. The highest productivity, however, is that of the Southern Region, with an average of 3,284 liters per cow per year, which is why it has led the ranking of milk production since 2015. The municipality of Castro, in Paraná, was the largest producer in 2017, with 264 million liters of milk. Paraná is already the second largest national producer with 4.7 billion liters, only surpassed by Minas Gerais.