Regional Changes

While the trends are downward for the numbers of farms in all regions, the Lake States and the Northeast have actually increased their shares of the nation’s total number of dairy farms (see Figure 7). The current share for the Lake States of 31 percent is up from 20 percent in 1970. The Northeast has increased its share from 12 percent to 24 percent. The Corn Belt Region has maintained a steady share of the number of dairy farms (around 17%) while shares for the Appalachia, the Northern Plains, and Southeast regions have decreased in the past 30 years. The Pacific region (not shown) has shown a modest increase in their share of dairy farms, from 3.2 percent to 5 percent. But, as we’ll see, counting the number of farms or the share of the nation’s farms can be misleading when assessing the importance of the regions’ dairy sector.

Figure 8 compares the percentages of dairy farms for several states. Massachusetts, like Arizona and New Mexico, has a very small share of the number of U.S. dairy farms. Massachusetts’ share peaked in the early 1980s, and then declined slightly. Throughout the period, Massachusetts’ share of the total number of U.S. dairy farms has been less than one-half of one percent. On the other hand, California has increased its share of dairy farms from just over one percent to nearly three percent. While California does not seem to be especially important when considering the number of farms, we’ll see shortly that there is more to be considered than just counting farms.

The current snapshot of the number of farms in the nation’s dairy industry suggests great changes over the past three decades in the numbers of farms across the country. But, as our illustrations have shown, the regions that have traditionally been milk producing regions of the U.S. appear to remain the milk producing regions and, perhaps, those states have even gained a greater share of the nation’s dairy production. The top ten states in terms of numbers of farms are shown in Table 1 for 1974 and 2004. The Lake States, Corn Belt and Northeast regions dominated the numbers of dairy farms. Thirty years later in 2004, most of the same states appear in the top ten list. Texas and Tennessee dropped off the list while another of the Lake States, Michigan, and another of the Corn Belt states, Indiana, joined the top ten list. In addition, the two Northeast states, Pennsylvania and New York, moved up in the list. It would appear that the nation’s dairy production regions have remained much the same over the past 30 years. But, as we’ll see below, the number of dairy farms is just one part of milk production, and that facet is becoming a smaller part of the overall picture of U.S. milk production.

 

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