Dairy Herd Sizes

Dairy farms with grazing cows in fields play an important role in travel/tourist brochures across New England . As we can see from Figure 9, Massachusetts has also lost many of its dairy cows as well as dairy farms since 1970. On average, Massachusetts has lost about 1,300 cows per year, a 3.1 percent rate of decline. Massachusetts currently has about one third of the milking cows it had in 1970.

One dramatic change in the U.S. dairy industry has been the increased size of dairy farms, measured as number of cows per farm. Figure 10 compares the trends in herd size for Massachusetts and the U.S. The average herd size for the U.S. grew from just 19 cows in 1970 to 128 cows in 2007, a growth rate of 5.1 percent. During the same period, the average herd size in Massachusetts grew from 35 to 65 cows per farm, or 1.8 percent per year on average. Wisconsin saw a 2.7 percent growth rate as the number of cows per farm increased from 28 1970 to 87 in 2007 . Massachusetts and Wisconsin dairy farms have grown more slowly that the U.S. as a whole. Farms in these two states are typical of smaller family owned and operated dairy farms, which have become fixtures of our agricultural landscape.

Wisconsin herd sizes are typical of the Lake States region, where 31 percent of U.S. dairy farms are located. If Wisconsin and Northeast farms have herd sizes below the U.S. average, then where are all the larger herds? Number of cows per farm has increased dramatically in the Pacific and Mountain regions of the country. In Figure 11, cows per farm for California and New Mexico are compared to the average herd size for the U.S. to illustrate these differences. Herd sizes in California and New Mexico have increased over the past three decades. In California the average herd size has increased nearly seven-fold, from 105 cows per farm to 824, a growth rate of 5.9 percent. New Mexico has seen a growth rate of 12.6 percent as average herd size increased from just 15 to 814 cows per farm. These increases have been especially dramatic in the past 10 years. We saw that the numbers of farms in these states represent small percentages of the U.S. total number of farms. But the scale of these operations is much greater than the small family dairy farms typical of the Northeast, Lake States and Corn Belt regions.

 

Source: Figures were constructed using data from the National Agricultural Statistics Service.