The U.S. Department of Agriculture's latest livestock inventory report shows that there are 1.2 million farms and ranches with cattle, including dairy as well as beef cattle. The trend in agriculture is to larger and fewer operations; but, the report indicates, numbers of farms with cattle remain very large. The total is down only 1% from a year earlier. In terms of cash receipts also, the cattle business remains by far the largest segment of agriculture.
Numbers of cattle operations by state range from 148,000 in Texas to 130 in Alaska, the USDA report shows. In virtually all parts of the country, beef and dairy cattle account for significant parts of the ag economy, Chuck Lambert, National Cattlemen's Association economist, points out.
More than a million of the 1.2 million cattle operations are beef cattle operations, ranging from farms with only a few animals to commercial-size ranches and feedlots with hundreds or thousands of animals. The 150,000 farms with milk cows are part of the beef business, too; their culled cows go for beef, and many dairy calves are grown and fed for market.
Some 97% of cattlemen are family farmers and ranchers, Census data show. Without cattle to graze their land, most of these farm families would not have viable farm or ranch businesses. Four out of five of today's cattle producers plan to pass their businesses on to their children or to other family members, so cattle are a key to the success of future generations of farmers, too.
"Much of the land used for cattle production is strictly grazing land," Lambert explains. "This land is too hilly and rough or too arid to be used for crop production. If it weren't for cattle, most of the nation's agricultural land would not have a productive use, and hundreds of thousands of families would not be able to live and work in rural areas."
The accompanying tabulation of numbers of operations with cattle shows that most states have 20,000 or more farms and ranches with cattle. The Midwest and Southeast, not just the traditional cattle country of the West, have large numbers of farms with cattle.
| Numbers of Operations With Cattle * | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| State | Cattle | State | Cattle | |
| Operations | Operations | |||
| AL | 33,000 | MT | 13,100 | |
| AK | 130 | NE | 29,000 | |
| AZ | 4,700 | NV | 1,600 | |
| AR | 31,000 | NH | 1,000 | |
| CA | 24,000 | NJ | 2,000 | |
| CO | 13,000 | NM | 9,000 | |
| CT | 1,400 | NY | 21,000 | |
| DE | 620 | NC | 32,000 | |
| FL | 20,000 | ND | 14,500 | |
| GA | 28,000 | OH | 41,000 | |
| HI | 800 | OK | 62,000 | |
| ID | 12,500 | OR | 23,000 | |
| IL | 29,000 | PA | 33,000 | |
| IN | 29,000 | RI | 300 | |
| IA | 45,000 | SC | 14,000 | |
| KS | 39,000 | SD | 21,000 | |
| KY | 52,000 | TN | 63,000 | |
| LA | 19,200 | TX | 148,000 | |
| ME | 2,700 | UT | 7,700 | |
| MD | 6,700 | VT | 3,900 | |
| MA | 1,800 | VA | 30,000 | |
| MI | 19,000 | WA | 21,000 | |
| MN | 38,000 | WV | 17,000 | |
| MS | 29,000 | WI | 51,000 | |
| MO | 75,000 | WY | 5,900 | |
| US TOTALS: | 1,219,250 | |||
* All operations with cattle, beef and dairy, 1994. The total number of operations with milk cows is approximately 150,000, so there are more than 1 million farms and ranches with beef cattle. Some 904,000 of the beef cattle operations have beef cows. The remaining beef cattle operations are involved in grazing and feeding (in feedlots) steers and heifers.Source: USDA.