ACES 2022 MAPPING LIVESTOCK AND POULTRY PRODUCTION BY COUNTY WITH THE USDA CENSUS OF AGRICULTURE
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Livestock and poultry production is an important part of the agricultural economy of the United States, providing meat, eggs, milk, fur, wool, and leather goods. Such production relies on crop yields, which in turn rely on ecosystem services such as fertile soil and pollinators. However, livestock and poultry production may be detrimental to public health, contributing to problems in water and air quality, greenhouse gas emissions, infectious disease outbreaks, and the spread of antibiotic resistance in pathogens. Therefore, understanding the distribution of these facilities is pertinent to the U.S. economy and the health of its people.
EnviroAtlas (https://www.epa.gov/enviroatlas) introduces a suite of geospatial layers mapping livestock and poultry production by county based on the USDA Census of Agriculture (CoA). The new livestock and poultry geospatial layers help fulfill EnviroAtlas’s goal of providing access to geospatial information on ecosystem services while supplementing other layers already within the catalog. As the authoritative source on agricultural facilities, the CoA provides metrics at the county-scale, counting any farm or ranch selling $1,000 or more in agricultural products annually. Depending on the animal sector, the CoA collects the number of heads present on the facility at the end of the Census year (Inventory), the number of heads sold by the facility throughout the Census year (Sales), or both. We processed metrics for eleven sectors, including all cattle, beef cattle, dairy cattle, calves, swine, laying hens, broiler chickens, turkeys, ducks, sheep, and horses. These EnviroAtlas maps display Inventory data for all sectors except calves and broiler chickens, which rely on Sales data. For each sector, the number of heads and the number of operations is reported by county. Additionally, for all sectors except turkeys, ducks, and horses, operations are further categorized as small, medium, or large, based on the number of heads managed/sold by the operation. EnviroAtlas displays the most recent Census year (2017) with additional Census years for download (2002, 2007, and 2012).
By providing this suite of CoA data as geospatial layers via EnviroAtlas, users can see the distribution and extent of livestock and poultry in their areas of interest and combine it with demographics or data about other ecosystem services like floodplains, water quality, and air quality. Future research might focus on ways to spatially refine metrics reported by the CoA from the county-scale to finer spatial scales to increase relevance and applicability to specific communities.