In Stardew Valley you have the responsibility of taking over your grandparent’s family farm. While the farm is in disrepair, you will slowly build it up, profit from the land and become the farmer you want to be. There are a large range of different profit streams to focus on, from foraging, to growing crops and even fishing. One type of farming you can do is keeping animals like pigs and cows and profiting from animal products.
This guide will show you how to breed cows and other animals in the game. This will mean you won’t have to go and purchase another animal every time to grow your barnyard. The same information from cows applied to any barn animal in the game. (Sheep and Goats) So you can use this information for all.
How to Purchase Cows
Before you can actually get breeding cows you will first have to purchase some of your own. To do this, you will have to build a barn somewhere on your farm. This can be achieved by having the village builder, Robin, build you one. Robin’s house can be found north of the community center (which is north of the town).
Building a Barn
To build the barn, approach the shop counter of Robin when she is at home. Talk to her and you will see the option to build some new items on the farm. The barn can be built with 6,000 gold, 350 Wood and 150 Stone. This will take three days to build. Once the first barn is built you will be able to store 4 animals inside of it.
Purchasing Your First Cow
With the barn successfully built on the farm, you are ready to purchase a new member! You can purchase animals from Marnie. Her ranch can be found south of the player’s farm. (Or South-West from the town.) Approach her when she is at home and you can purchase animals. If you have a Coop, this is where you can purchase chickens and ducks as well.
You can purchase a cow for 1,500g. After you purchase the cow you will have to assign it to a barn. After this the cow will be delivered to the barn for you! Make sure you purchase something for them to eat while you are at Marnie’s shop.
How to Breed/Reproduce Cows in Stardew Valley
Now that we have a cow in the barn it is time to get to work getting some more! You only need one cow in Stardew Valley to reproduce more. There is no actual way to ‘breed cows’ per say in Stardew Valley. They simply have a random chance every day to get pregnant with a baby. The chance for an animal to get pregnant is best described in this excerpt from the Stardew Valley Wiki page:
“Similar to animal attacks, if there are no other events occurring in the night, there will be a 50% chance that the game will attempt an animal birth event. The game searches through all buildings for an upgraded Barn that isn’t full.
The game then makes another check where there is a 0.55% * (the number of animals inside) chance of proceeding with the event. For example, an upgraded barn with three animals inside would have a 1.65% chance of passing this check. If the building fails this check, the game will continue going through all buildings until none are left.
When a barn passes all these checks, a random animal inside is chosen. If the animal is not a baby and has pregnancy enabled, that animal will give birth.“
All you have to do is keep sleeping the night away and making sure that no other random events are happening during the night. As it is completely up to chance, you might just have to get lucky. That being said, as long as you have a free slot in the barn there is a good chance an animal will be born soon. An animal getting pregnant and giving birth is a very common occurrence in Stardew Valley.
How to Stop Animals Getting Pregnant in Stardew Valley
If you don’t want your animals to get pregnant in Stardew Valley luckily there is a setting that allows you to disable pregnancy per animal. This is very helpful if you have multiple animals, such as a cow and goat, in the same barn, but only want to have a new goat.
To disable pregnancy on an animal, approach them and press the interact button on them. The first time you interact with the animal, you will pet them. Press them once more to open up their animal panel. There is a toggle on the right which is called Allow Pregnancy. Toggle this off so that there is a red X across the symbol and the animal will never get pregnant. (Until you allow it again.)
