Earlier this week the Washington Post‘s Wonkblog released one of the coolest visual representations of data we’ve seen in a long time: an interactive map displaying the distribution of America’s entire goat population by county.
While WaPo gets a little shy and throws in the caveat that this “may not be the World’s Most Important Map,” we’d like to put forth that this is an extremely awesome and actually pretty revealing project.
- According to the latest USDA Agricultural Census in 2012, 2,621,514 goats are hanging out in the United States; in 2009, France was home to 1.27 million goats, and China an enormous 152 million.
- Almost 80% of all US goats are raised for their meat—only 16% for their milk.
- The biggest concentrations of goat farms are in Texas and Arizona (the goat-to-human ratio of Sutton County, TX, is 22:1).
- YouTube is currently hosting 3.2 million videos somehow related to goats.
In conclusion, here is one of those videos:
Grant Bradley
Grant Bradley is culture's former web editor and never ceases to thank his nameless human ancestor who figured that leaving some milk around for a while and then eating it was probably a great idea. Raised on California’s Central Coast, educated in the Pacific Northwest, and transplanted to New England, Grant likes to write, edit, and code things.
