Some Interesting Dairy Cow Facts
We like to poke around in the Census of Agriculture report that is issued every five years. You can always find something interesting in these reports.
For today, I wanted to review some of the information about dairy cows from the 2007 census.
For that year, there were a total of 69,890 farms that were considered to be a dairy farm and included a total of 9,266,574 dairy cows.
The top five dairy states for cow numbers were:
- California 1.84 million
- Wisconsin 1.25 million
- New York 626 thousand
- Pennsylvania 553 thousand
- Idaho 536 thousand
Idaho has a population of a little more than 1.5 million people, therefore the people to dairy cow ratio is 3 to 1. Continuing this analysis, Cassia county in Idaho has about 21,000 people and 54,000 dairy cows, so here the people to cow ratio is 1 to almost 3. The biggest cow to people ratio in Idaho was Gooding County. This county has about 140,000 cows and only about 14,000 people. This results in 10 cows for every person in this county. There may be other counties with more cows per person, but this one jumps out at me.
I will continue to look for little nuggets of information like this and am eagerly awaiting the 2012 farm census to update the numbers.
Paul Neiffer is a certified public accountant and business advisor specializing in income taxation, accounting services, and succession planning for farmers and agribusiness processors. Paul is a principal with CliftonLarsonAllen in Walla Walla, Washington, as well as a regular speaker at national conferences and contributor at agweb.com. Raised on a farm in central Washington, he has been immersed in the ag industry his entire life, including the last 30 years professionally. Paul and his wife purchase an 180 acre ranch in 2016 and enjoy keeping it full of animals.
Great statistic! I’m glad to see that our ratio here in Wisconsin is 4.5 to 1. CA may have more cows, but they have to share each cow with 19 of their fellow citizens…