Dairy Herd Sizes

Dairy farms with cows grazing in fields play an important role in travel/tourist brochures across New England. As we can see from Figure 9, in addition to losing dairy farms, Massachusetts has also lost many of its dairy cows over the past 3 decades. 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 its 1970 total number of milking cows.

One dramatic change in the U.S. dairy industry has been the increased size of dairy farms as measured by the 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 20 cows in 1970 to 111 cows in 2004, a growth rate of 5.1 percent. During the same period, the average herd size in Massachusetts grew from 35 to 63 cows per farm, or 1.8 percent per year on average. In Wisconsin , the rate of growth was 2.6 percent as the number of cows increased from 28 cows per farm in 1970 to 78 cows per farm in 2004. Massachusetts and Wisconsin dairy farms have grown more slowly that the U.S. average. 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 of the country 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 farms with herd sizes that exceed the national average? The number of cows per farm has increased dramatically in the Pacific and Mountain regions of the country. In Figure 11, the numbers of 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 750, a growth rate of 5.9 percent. In New Mexico, the rate of growth has been 12.9 percent as the average herd size increased from just 15 cows to 724 cows. The increases in these states 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.