Total Milk Production

Total annual milk production, or supply, depends upon the number of farms, the number of milking cows on those farms and milk production per cow. We’ve reviewed those factors above. In Massachusetts, our loss of farms has dominated modest gains in herd size and productivity. As a result, Massachusetts produces less than half the total amount of milk produced in 1970. (Can Massachusetts Produce It's Own Milk?)

The top ten producing states in 1974 and 2004 are shown in Table 2. In 1974, U.S. production was at 115,586 million pounds. The leading production state, Wisconsin , produced just over 16 percent of the total U.S. production, while California produced about 9 percent. By 2004, U.S. total annual production had increased to 170,934 million pounds.

Wisconsin’s share had dropped to just under 13 percent, while California’s production more than tripled, increasing its share to more than 21 percent of the nation’s total milk production. California took over as the nation’s top producing state in 1993 as shown in Figure 15.

During the period 1975 to 2005, three western states, Idaho and New Mexico in the Mountain region, and Washington in the Pacific region, joined the list of top ten producing states and three Corn Belt states, Iowa , Ohio and Missouri , dropped from the top ten. In 1974, the Lake States and the Corn Belt combined for about 40 percent of total U.S. production. By 2005, the two regions produced about 27 percent of the U.S. supply, despite having 48 percent of the nation’s dairy farms (Figure 16).

During the same period, dairy farms from the Pacific and Mountain regions increased their share of U.S. production from under 17 percent to more than 40 percent. These two regions of the U.S. had just 10 percent of the U.S. dairy farms in 2004 (see Figure 5). The rapid growth in herd sizes in the western states was the dominant factor in the shift of America’s Dairyland to the western states. The Northeast region continues to be an important dairy production region with nearly one-quarter of the dairy farms. The Northeast’s share of production has slipped from just over 20 percent in 1975 to about 16 percent in 2005. New York and Pennsyvlania continue to represent the Northeast in the list of top 10 milk producing states.

Massachusetts’ share of the national total milk supply has slipped from about 0.6 percent to under 0.2 percent. We saw that Massachusetts, New Mexico and Arizona had similar trends in the numbers of dairy farms. But the trends in supply are much different, certainly due to differences in production per cow, but primarily due to differences in the herd sizes for farms in these states. New Mexico became one of the nation’s top ten dairy production states and Arizona has more than quadrupled its supply. We saw in the discussion of herd sizes above that the average New Mexico farm had over 700 cows.

 

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