What the country grows and raises, back to 1866.

The longest records on this site. Corn, wheat, cotton, hay, barley and oats all run from 1866; cattle, hogs and sheep from the same decade. Beef and pork production start in 1899, milk in 1924.

How to use it

• Toggle series on the left, zoom to any era, hover for exact values.
• Start with the three that are on by default — cattle, corn yield, milk per cow — then add what you want to compare.

The four groups

• Livestock & poultry — head counts. Inventories are a snapshot on one day each year; broilers and turkeys are annual production, which is why they read in billions.
• Food output — what the animals produced, by weight: milk, beef, pork, cheese, butter, plus milk per cow.
• Crops — production — every major US crop in its own natural unit (bushels, tons, bales, cwt).
• Crops — yield & acreage — bushels per acre, and acres harvested.

What the long series actually show

The recurring story is output rising while the inputs fall:

• Corn yield was flat near 26 bu/acre for seventy years, then hybrids arrive in the 1930s and it climbs nearly sevenfold. Corn acreage today is not far off where it was a century ago — the extra output is almost entirely yield.
• Dairy cows fell 65% from their 1945 peak while milk output nearly doubled, because yield per cow went 4,572 → 24,390 lb.
• Beef production holds up through a shrinking cattle herd: heavier carcasses per animal.
• Oats is the clearest picture of mechanisation anywhere in this data. Oats fed horses; the tractor ended that.
• Sheep went from 56 million head in 1942 to under 5 million.

Good to know

Source is USDA NASS QuickStats (public domain). Coverage is uneven and that is the source, not a gap: poultry, goats and eggs only exist in QuickStats from 2008 — the older poultry numbers are in printed USDA yearbooks the API does not carry.

Inventories and production are different kinds of number. A head count on 1 January and a year’s total output are not comparable directly, so read them as separate lines rather than one story.