The Transformation of U.S. Livestock Agriculture: Scale, Efficiency, and Risks

By James M. MacDonald and William D. McBride

Economic Information Bulletin No. (EIB-43) 44 pp, January 2009

U.S. livestock production has shifted to much larger and more specialized farms, and the various stages of input provision, farm production, and processing are now much more tightly coordinated through formal contracts and shared ownership of assets. Important financial advantages have driven these structural changes, which in turn have boosted productivity growth in the livestock sector. But structural changes can also generate environmental and health risks for society, as industrialization concentrates animals and animal wastes in localized areas. This report relies on farm-level data to detail the nature, causes, and effects of structural changes in livestock production.

Keywords: Livestock, dairy, broilers, hogs, fed cattle, farm structure, scale economies, contract agriculture, CAFOs, growth-promoting antibiotics, ERS, USDA

In this report ...

Chapters are in Adobe Acrobat PDF format.

• Report summary, 155 kb. | HTML

• Abstract, Contents, and Summary, 47 kb.
• Introduction, 25 kb.
• How Has the Structure of Animal Agriculture Changed?, 151 kb.
• Drivers of Structural Change: Technology and Scale Economies, 194 kb.
• Other Drivers of Structural Change, 22 kb.
• Impacts of Structural Change, 176 kb.
• Conclusions, 17 kb.
• References, 23 kb.

• Entire report, 551 kb.

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Updated date: January 23, 2009