There are a lot of cows in the US. The headcount at the beginning of 2014 was about 87.7 million, which is a notable decline from ten years earlier, when it was close to 95 million. Still, it’s an impressive number – approximately one cow for every 3.6 people, or 0.278 cows per capita. These data include both cattle and calves.

For this graphic, I’ve mapped the cattle per capita values by state. No surprises here: the states in the middle of the country, which are generally less populated and home to many farms, have the highest values. South Dakota leads the pack, with 4.32 cows per person, followed by Nebraska at 3.29. I also graphed the population values on a scatter plot for those interested in the raw data. From this, you can see that Texas has the most cattle at 10.9 million.

Data source: http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/current/Catt/Catt-01-31-2014.txt