Dairy Cattle and Milk Production (United States)

NAICS 2022 code 112120 — the farms that milk cows.

NAICS is the North American Industry Classification System, the federal standard for sorting businesses. Code 112120 covers establishments primarily engaged in raising dairy cattle to produce fluid (raw) milk. It is the farm gate — the barn and the milking parlor — not the plant that turns raw milk into cheese, butter, or a carton on a shelf.

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1. Overview

Milk is one of the largest single farm commodities in the United States. American dairy farms produced about 226 billion pounds of milk in 2024 and roughly 232 billion pounds in 2025, from a herd of about 9.3–9.5 million cows [1][2]. Milk sales put roughly $50.7 billion of cash into farmers' pockets in 2024 — about a fifth of all U.S. livestock and animal-product cash receipts — before easing to about $48.9 billion in 2025 [2][3].

This is a biological, land- and capital-intensive commodity business. Farm revenue depends mainly on milk volume, milk components (fat and protein), and the farm-gate price. Profit depends on that revenue less feed, labor, veterinary care, energy, hauling, land, debt, herd replacement, and environmental-compliance costs. Because it is a commodity, prices swing sharply from year to year, and the entire dairy economy — the co-ops that market the milk, the processors that turn it into cheese and yogurt, the genetics and animal-health suppliers, the equipment and feed vendors, and the export channel — is built on top of this one farm activity.

Public vs. private ways in. The farms themselves are almost entirely private: family operations, partnerships, limited-liability and employee-owned companies, and large privately held mega-dairies, most of which market their milk through farmer-owned cooperatives (member businesses, not tradable stocks). There is effectively no U.S.-listed pure-play dairy-farm stock. Public-market investors get exposure indirectly — through the processors and brands that buy the milk, the input suppliers that sell to the farm, farmland vehicles, and dairy futures. Private investors participate directly by owning or financing farms, herds, and farmland, or by investing in the private processing and co-op ecosystem, specialty brands, or manure-to-energy infrastructure. Sections 4 and 10 lay out both routes.

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2. What it is, and how it's structured

Scope. NAICS 112120 is the commercial production of cow's milk: keeping a milking herd, feeding and caring for the animals, milking, cooling, managing manure, and selling the raw milk to cooperatives, processors, or handlers. The primary revenue is milk; a meaningful secondary line is the sale of cull cows and surplus calves into the beef supply, plus (on some farms) crops, manure, or renewable energy.

What it excludes — this matters, because "dairy" in everyday speech blends several distinct industries [4]:

• Raising dairy replacement heifers (young females not yet milking) is classified under 112111, Beef Cattle Ranching and Farming.
• Dual-purpose cattle raised for both milk and meat fall under 112130, Dual-Purpose Cattle Ranching and Farming.
• Milking goats and other non-cattle dairy fall under 112420, Goat Farming, and elsewhere in the 112 animal-production family.
• Processing — turning raw milk into product — is a separate manufacturing family: 311511 Fluid Milk, 311513 Cheese, 311512 Creamery Butter, 311514 Dry/Condensed/Evaporated Dairy, and 311520 Ice Cream. When you read that "Dairy Farmers of America has $23 billion in revenue," most of that is 311xxx processing and marketing activity, not 112120 farm production.

Ownership mix. Overwhelmingly private and family-linked, but consolidating fast into fewer, much larger operations. Most farms — of every size — sell their milk through a cooperative that pools members' milk, markets it, and often owns processing plants. A minority of very large private dairies (tens of thousands of cows) sell direct to processors or run their own. Large integrated operators may control feed production, farms, transportation, processing, and branded products. Publicly traded owners of U.S. milking herds are rare to nonexistent.

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3. How big it is

What our federal ground truth actually contains. The only figure in the Histometrics-ingested federal file for NAICS 112120 is the Small Business Administration (SBA) size standard: a dairy farm with $3.75 million or less in annual receipts counts as "small" for federal small-business programs [7]. That is an eligibility threshold, not a measure of industry revenue, and it is a bar that most — but no longer all — U.S. dairy farms clear. Our file carries no ingested establishment count, payroll, employment, or receipts figure for this industry. Where a Census/SBA business metric would normally anchor a Histometrics primer, treat it as not available for this farm sector rather than assume a business-database count represents the whole industry.

Why the usual business data undercount it. Agriculture sits largely outside the Economic Census, County Business Patterns (CBP), and Statistics of U.S. Businesses (SUSB) — the payroll-business programs that anchor most primers. Those programs exclude crop and animal production (all of NAICS 112) and also omit self-employed operators and businesses without paid employees or an employer identification number [8]. Standard business databases therefore understate an industry dominated by owner-operated farms. For dairy, the authoritative counts come instead from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA): its five-yearly Census of Agriculture and the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) milk surveys. The figures below are USDA's, not the Census Bureau's business statistics, and they capture the full farm population a standard business view would miss.

USDA's Economic Research Service (ERS) provides the income and cost figures; NASS provides the physical output and inventory counts. "cwt" is a hundredweight = 100 pounds of milk, the industry's standard pricing unit.

Farm count and concentration. The 2022 Census of Agriculture counted roughly 24,000 dairy farms that sold milk (about 24,082 by one tabulation, 24,470 by another), holding about 9.3 million milk cows, with $52.8 billion in milk sales in the census year — with farm numbers down about 39% from 2017 [6]. Output is heavily concentrated: farms with 1,000+ cows were only about 8% of dairy farms but produced roughly 68% of the milk [6]. The top five states — California, Wisconsin, Idaho, New York, and Texas — together produced more than 65% of U.S. milk in 2024; California alone booked about $9.7 billion in milk sales, followed by Wisconsin (~$7.4B), New York (~$3.9B), Idaho (~$3.7B), and Texas (~$3.5B) [8].

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4. The investable universe

There is no clean public "dairy farm" table, because the farms are private or cooperative. The realistic public-market universe is the businesses that buy from or sell to the farm, plus vehicles tied to farm assets. Scale figures below are approximate and mix company-wide revenue with dairy-specific lines; they show relative size, not a pure 112120 read. Tickers, prices, and yields belong to this section and Section 10 — not to the industry itself.

A. Milk buyers, processors, and dairy brands (public exposure to the demand side)

B. Input and enabler suppliers (public exposure to the cost side)

Robotics and milking systems — Lely and DeLaval (part of Tetra Laval) — are two of the biggest enablers of the modern automated dairy, but both are privately held.

C. Farm-asset vehicles (thin, indirect)

• Gladstone Land (LAND, Nasdaq) and Farmland Partners (FPI, NYSE) are farmland real-estate investment trusts (REITs — companies that own income-producing real estate and pay out most earnings as dividends). Both are overwhelmingly weighted to crops (produce, permanent plantings, row crops), not dairy; they are farmland exposure, not dairy exposure [10].

D. Cooperatives and large private owners (not tradable, but the real center of gravity)

• Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) — the largest U.S. dairy co-op, with about 9,000 farmer-owners; it markets roughly a third of U.S. milk and reported about $23 billion in 2024 revenue [11][43].
• Land O'Lakes — about $16.2 billion in 2024 revenue and more than 1,100 dairy-producer members, alongside its crop-inputs and animal-nutrition businesses [12].
• California Dairies — cooperative owned by nearly 300 family farms shipping about 17 billion pounds of milk a year [37].
• Darigold / Northwest Dairy Association — ~300 farm families across the Pacific Northwest [39].
• Prairie Farms — 500+ farm families and dozens of manufacturing plants [38].
• Other major co-ops: Foremost Farms, Agri-Mark, Select Milk Producers, Michigan Milk Producers.
• Lactalis — privately held French dairy group with large U.S. cheese, milk, yogurt, and ingredient operations [40].
• Chobani — large private branded processor; has taken early steps toward a possible public listing but had not listed as of early 2026 [45].
• Largest private farm operators (milking herds, NAICS 112120 proper): Riverview LLP (Minnesota-based, family- and employee-owned, ~110,000+ cows across several states) [41], Threemile Canyon Farms (Oregon, ~33,000 milking), Fair Oaks Farms (Indiana, ~36,000), Aurora Organic Dairy (organic, 20,000+ cows), and Milk Source (Wisconsin) [42].

Bottom line for the table-seeker: if you want the farm itself, that is a private/co-op world. Public markets offer the demand side (KO, Saputo, Danone, Nestlé, Lifeway) and the cost side (ZTS, ELAN, GNS, DE) plus commodity futures — not the barn.

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5. How the money works

A dairy farm is a commodity price-taker with a biological cost base. Owners make money on the spread between the milk price they receive and the cost to produce a hundredweight of milk — everything else is a variation on that theme.

Revenue per cwt. Farmers rarely negotiate price; they receive a regulated blend price set through the Federal Milk Marketing Order (FMMO) system (Section 7), which ties farm pay to the wholesale value of cheese, butter, nonfat dry milk, and dry whey by class of use. The all-milk price (the average price farmers actually receive) moves with those commodity markets. Example benchmarks: the Class III (cheese-milk) price was about $15.17/cwt in January 2024 and the Class I (fluid) base ran about $19.18/cwt in spring 2024, with regional differentials on top (Florida highest, the Upper Midwest lowest) [15]. Average producer returns were about $21.19/cwt in 2025 [2].

Cost per cwt, and why scale wins. Feed — corn, soybean meal, hay, and forage — is the swing cost and usually the single largest line. University of Illinois farm records put 2024 feed cost near $11.64/cwt and non-feed operating cost near $11.92/cwt, for a total around $23.60/cwt [16]. Scale matters enormously: USDA estimated 2021 average total production cost at $42.70/cwt for herds under 50 cows versus $19.14/cwt for herds of 2,000+ — the low-cost large farm produces milk at less than half the small farm's unit cost [25].

The margin is everything. Put revenue and cost together and the industry's famous cyclicality is obvious:

• 2023: total cost ~$26.74/cwt against lower milk prices → an average loss of about $4.23/cwt — a brutal year [16].
• 2024: costs fell to ~$23.60/cwt as feed eased and prices firmed → a positive net return of about $1.42/cwt [16].

A swing of a few dollars per cwt flips the whole industry from loss to profit. On a farm shipping ~25 million pounds a year (a ~1,000-cow operation), a $1/cwt move is $250,000 of pre-tax margin. USDA's Dairy Margin Coverage (DMC) program tracks a simplified national milk-price-minus-feed-cost margin, which rose from $7.81/cwt in January 2026 to $10.62/cwt in May [24] — useful as a directional gauge, though it ignores labor, buildings, land, interest, and regional variation, so it can look "adequate" while individual farms lose money.

Other operating metrics that drive returns: milk pounds per cow, feed cost per cow, milk-fat and protein yields, cull and replacement-cow costs, debt service, milk quality (somatic-cell counts, antibiotic-residue performance), and — for integrated players — plant utilization and product mix.

The productivity engine. Because price is out of the farmer's control, the durable edge is cost per cwt, driven by milk per cow. Output per cow has climbed relentlessly — about 24,178 lb in 2024 and 24,390 lb in 2025 [1][2] — through genetics, nutrition, cow comfort, and automation (robotic milking, sensors). That is why the milk supply keeps growing even as cow numbers barely move and farm numbers fall, and it drives the market for genetics (Genus/ABS) and animal-health (Zoetis, Elanco) suppliers.

Byproduct revenue. When milk prices are weak, cull-cow and calf sales into a strong beef market can be the difference between profit and loss — a link that tightened in 2024–2025 as beef prices ran high.

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6. What drives demand

Milk demand is really demand for dairy products, split across uses that pull farm milk in different directions:

• Cheese is the growth engine. Domestic per-capita cheese consumption is near 42 pounds, up ~13% over the past decade, and cheese dominates exports [17][18].
• Butter and fat. After decades of "low-fat" messaging, full-fat is back: butter consumption hit a record ~6.8 pounds per person in 2024, up ~21% in a decade [17].
• Yogurt, high-protein, cultured, and lactose-free products (Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, kefir, protein shakes like fairlife) are a steady tailwind, and generally carry better branding and pricing power than undifferentiated fluid milk.
• Fluid (drinking) milk is in long, slow decline — down to about 127 pounds per person — which USDA attributes to competition from other beverages and a shrinking share of children in the population [17][33].

Total per-capita dairy consumption (milk-fat basis) reached about 651 pounds in 2024, near record highs [18]. On top of domestic demand sits exports, roughly a sixth of U.S. milk solids: cheese exports set a record in 2024 (~509,000 metric tons, +17%, ~$2.4 billion), even as total dairy exports slipped a fraction on a milk-solids basis [19]. Mexico, Canada, and Southeast Asia are the anchor markets, so global prices, exchange rates, and trade policy feed back into U.S. farm prices.

Generic demand is also supported by a mandatory dairy checkoff: farmers pay a 15-cent-per-cwt assessment and importers 7.5 cents per cwt to fund promotion and research [26].

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7. Regulation

Dairy is one of the most heavily regulated farm sectors in the U.S., and the rules directly shape farm revenue.

• Milk pricing (FMMOs). Eleven regional Federal Milk Marketing Orders, administered by USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), set minimum prices processors must pay farmers by class of use (Class I–IV) and pool the proceeds; the class prices are calculated from formulas tied to dairy-product markets [15]. In November 2024 USDA finalized the most significant FMMO overhaul in two decades — updating the make-allowance and pricing formulas — approved by producer referendum and effective June 2025 [20]. These formula changes move real money between farmers and processors.
• Safety net (DMC). The Dairy Margin Coverage program pays farmers when the national milk-minus-feed margin falls below an insured level — a genuine but blunt backstop that uses a national margin and ignores non-feed and regional costs [21][24].
• Food safety. Almost all commercial milk is pasteurized; the FDA-administered Grade "A" Pasteurized Milk Ordinance (PMO) is the model framework for interstate milk safety (FDA lists the 2025 PMO, posted 2026, as current) [27]. Raw-milk sales are tightly restricted and vary by state; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends against raw milk [32].
• Water and manure. An animal feeding operation (AFO) is generally a site where animals are confined and fed 45+ days in a 12-month period; large or discharging concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) may need a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit and nutrient-management plan under the Clean Water Act [28]. Methane from cattle is a growing climate-policy focus — a cost pressure, but also an emerging revenue line, since manure digesters can sell renewable natural gas and carbon credits.
• Animal drugs. Milk cannot be sold before required drug-withdrawal periods expire; residue violations bring rejected milk, recalls, and penalties [29].
• Organic. Certified organic dairy requires organic feed, certification, and pasture standards — at least 30% of dry-matter intake from pasture during the grazing season and at least 120 days of pasture access [30].
• Labor and immigration. Dairy runs 365 days a year and cannot use the seasonal H-2A visa program, leaving it heavily dependent on a largely immigrant workforce; immigration enforcement and labor-cost policy are perennial, material risks.
• Animal disease. USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) regulates cattle movement and traceability; since 2024 it has imposed testing and movement orders in response to H5N1 avian influenza in dairy cattle, with 2026 guidance updating testing for lactating cows moving interstate [31] (Section 9).

State and local rules on water rights, zoning, air quality, animal welfare, and facility siting can matter as much as federal ones.

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8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

The defining fact of this industry is relentless consolidation: fewer, far larger farms producing more milk.

• Licensed dairy herds fell from 66,825 in 2004 to 24,811 in 2024, a 63% decline, and to about 23,609 in 2025 [5].
• The Census of Agriculture shows the same: roughly 24,000 dairy farms in 2022, down about 39% from 2017 — some 15,000 farms lost in five years [6].
• Yet milk output keeps climbing, because the survivors are bigger and far more productive. Average herd size roughly tripled from about 112 cows in 2000 to nearly 300 by the early 2020s, and 1,000+-cow farms now make more than two-thirds of the milk [6].

Why. Milk's razor-thin, volatile margins reward scale: bigger farms spread labor, equipment, and compliance costs across more milk, buy inputs cheaper, adopt automation and better genetics, secure more reliable access to feed, labor, capital, and buyers, and survive down-years that wipe out smaller operators. Barriers to entry — land, water, permits, manure capacity, local opposition, animal-health expertise, and the need to operate continuously — are steep. Cooperatives concentrate too: a handful (DFA, Land O'Lakes, California Dairies, Darigold) market the bulk of U.S. milk and increasingly own the processing plants, integrating the farm forward into cheese, butter, and powder [11][12].

Substitution. Plant-based "milk" (oat, almond, soy) captured a slice of the fluid-milk aisle, though its growth has cooled; it is a headwind for the declining drinking-milk category more than for cheese and butter. The forward judgment across USDA and industry analysts is that consolidation continues — a future of a few tens of thousands of large farms, with the small commercial dairy increasingly the exception. For private investors this creates acquisition and succession opportunities alongside rising regulatory, environmental, and community risk; for public investors the most visible consolidation is downstream, among processors and branded owners buying plants, brands, and distribution.

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9. Risks

• Price and margin cyclicality. The core risk: milk prices and feed costs swing independently, and the margin can flip from strong profit to deep loss within a year (2023's ~$4/cwt loss vs. 2024's positive return) [16]. High operating and debt leverage on large farms amplifies it.
• Feed-cost shocks. Drought, corn/soybean price spikes, and energy costs hit the largest expense line directly.
• Biological / disease risk. H5N1 avian influenza in dairy cattle was first confirmed in U.S. cows in March 2024, a genuinely new disease for the sector; by mid-2025, 1,000+ herds across 17 states had been affected, cutting output in infected herds and prompting a National Milk Testing Strategy and movement controls [22][31]. Retail dairy has tested safe (pasteurization inactivates the virus), but the outbreak remains a production, cost, and — via sporadic human cases in farmworkers — public-health risk. Mastitis, heat stress, and fertility problems are chronic background risks.
• Environmental. Manure leaks, nutrient runoff, groundwater impacts, methane rules, and permit disputes can delay expansion or create large liabilities.
• Water and weather. Drought, heat, floods, and water-rights restrictions hit both cows and feed.
• Trade and tariffs. With exports now essential to balance supply, retaliatory tariffs or lost market access can strand milk solids at home and depress prices.
• Labor. Dependence on immigrant labor makes farms acutely exposed to immigration enforcement and wage pressure.
• Substitution and diet shifts. Continued decline in fluid-milk drinking; plant-based and, potentially, cell-based alternatives.
• Downstream concentration. A single large processor's failure can strand farmers' milk — the 2019 bankruptcy of Dean Foods, then the largest U.S. fluid-milk processor, left thousands of farms scrambling for a buyer.
• Financial leverage. Dairy requires heavy investment in land, barns, cows, equipment, and working capital; high leverage makes downturns more severe.

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10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public-market routes (indirect — there is no listed U.S. dairy-farm stock):

• Buy the demand side. Processors and branded owners profit when dairy consumption grows and can hold margin even when farm milk is cheap: Coca-Cola (KO) via fairlife, Saputo (SAP), Danone (BN), Nestlé (NESN), General Mills (GIS), Kraft Heinz (KHC), Lifeway (LWAY). Their farm-milk exposure is one input among many. Useful measures: milk intake/volume, commodity-vs-branded mix, raw-milk cost, gross margin, plant utilization, inventory, capex, leverage, EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization), free cash flow, and valuation relative to the dairy cycle.
• Buy the cost side. Suppliers that sell into every dairy farm regardless of the milk price: animal health (Zoetis ZTS, Elanco ELAN), genetics (Genus GNS), equipment (Deere DE, CNH, AGCO), feed/nutrition (ADM). These track the number and size of cows more than the milk price.
• Commodities/futures. The most direct liquid exposure to dairy prices is the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) complex — Class III and Class IV milk, cheese, butter, dry whey, and nonfat dry milk futures and options. These are the hedging tools farmers and processors use; they carry leverage and roll risk and are not buy-and-hold instruments.
• Farmland vehicles (Gladstone Land LAND, Farmland Partners FPI) exist but are crop-weighted — farmland, not dairy, exposure [10].

Private-market routes (where the farm actually lives):

• Direct ownership or partnership in a dairy operation or herd; investment in or lending to large private dairies.
• Cooperative membership (the standard structure for selling milk; ties capital to the farm).
• Ownership stakes in private processors, ingredient makers, and dairy-tech (robotic milking, herd-management software, manure digesters/renewable natural gas). The methane-to-energy angle is an emerging private-capital theme.
• Dairy farmland and water rights, especially in the low-cost Western basins (Idaho, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona). Underwrite cost per cwt, feed sourcing, hedging, debt service, replacement-herd needs, water and permits, labor, manure economics, customer concentration, cooperative terms, and succession.

Near-term drivers to watch:

1. The milk-feed margin. USDA forecasts higher production — about 236.6 billion pounds in 2026 and 238.1 billion in 2027 — on herd expansion, low slaughter, and longer cow retention, but lower all-milk prices (~$20.00/cwt in 2026, ~$19.85 in 2027) and softer cash receipts [2][23]. That is the classic setup for margin compression; watch feed costs as the offset.
2. New FMMO pricing formulas (effective June 2025) redistributing revenue between farmers and processors [20].
3. H5N1's trajectory — containment vs. further spread — as a production and cost wildcard [22][31].
4. Exports and trade policy — cheese-export momentum vs. tariff/retaliation risk [19].
5. Continued consolidation favoring low-cost, large-scale, often Western operations and the co-ops that integrate forward into cheese and value-added products.

The through-line: dairy production is a large, essential, heavily regulated, and structurally consolidating commodity industry. It rewards scale and cost control, it lives and dies by the milk-price-minus-feed-cost margin, and its investable surface for public markets is the ecosystem around the barn — not the barn itself. The demand story (cheese, butter, protein, exports) is durable; the farm-level economics are cyclical and, into 2026–2027, likely tightening. No dairy investment fully escapes commodity, disease, environmental, and consumer risk.

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Sources

1. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, "Milk Production" (annual 2024 data), 2025. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/reports/mkpr0225.pdf
2. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, "Milk Production, Disposition, and Income 2025 Summary," 2026. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/reports/mlkpdi26.pdf
3. USDA Economic Research Service, "Cash receipts by commodity / animal products, 2024," 2025. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/farm-income-and-wealth-statistics/annual-cash-receipts-by-commodity
4. U.S. Census Bureau, "North American Industry Classification System — Sector 11 definitions (112120, 112111, 112130, 112420, 311xxx)," 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/
5. USDA Economic Research Service, "Fewer Farms, More Milk: The Changing Structure and Costs of U.S. Dairy Farming" (licensed herds 2004–2025), 2026. https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2026/february/fewer-farms-more-milk-the-changing-structure-and-costs-of-us-dairy-farming
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12. Star Tribune / Dairy Foods, "Land O'Lakes 2024 revenue $16.2B; member counts," 2025. https://www.startribune.com/land-o-lakes-dairy-milk-cheese-butter-purina-crop-agriculture-downturn/601241156
13. The Coca-Cola Company, "fairlife," 2026. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/brands/juices-dairy-and-plant-based/fairlife
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16. farmdoc daily / University of Illinois, "Economic Review of Milk Costs in 2024 and Projections for 2025 and 2026," December 2025. https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2025/12/economic-review-of-milk-costs-in-2024-and-projections-for-2025-and-2026.html
17. International Dairy Foods Association, "Butter Consumption Hits Historic High; cheese, yogurt, fluid-milk per-capita, 2024," 2025. https://www.idfa.org/news/you-butter-believe-it-butter-consumption-hits-historic-high-as-yogurt-cottage-cheese-and-ice-cream-notch-growth-in-2024
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19. U.S. Dairy Export Council, "U.S. cheese exports set new record as overall U.S. dairy exports dip slightly in 2024," 2025. https://www.usdec.org/newsroom/news-releases/news-releases/news-release-2/6/2025
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27. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, "National Conference on Interstate Milk Shipments (NCIMS) Model Documents — Grade 'A' Pasteurized Milk Ordinance (2025 PMO)," 2026. https://www.fda.gov/food/milk-guidance-documents-regulatory-information/national-conference-interstate-milk-shipments-ncims-model-documents
28. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Animal Feeding Operations (AFOs) — NPDES CAFO permitting," 2026. https://www.epa.gov/npdes/animal-feeding-operations-afos
29. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, "Adequate Records Help Prevent Illegal Drug Residues and Ensure Food Safety," 2026. https://www.fda.gov/animal-veterinary/animal-health-literacy/adequate-records-help-prevent-illegal-drug-residues-and-ensure-food-safety
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