Sheep and Goat Farming in the United States (NAICS 1124)

A Histometrics rollup primer for public-market and private investors.

The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code 1124, Sheep and Goat Farming, is a four-digit industry group that rolls up the two small-ruminant livestock businesses in U.S. agriculture: 11241 Sheep Farming and 11242 Goat Farming. This page synthesizes the two child primers and gives the combined figures; for the full treatment of either animal — unit economics, named companies, demand mechanics, and diligence questions — see the 11241 and 11242 primers.

The two industries are close cousins operationally — small grazing animals, tiny margins, extreme farm-level fragmentation, no U.S.-listed pure-play, and a chronic dependence on imported meat from Australia and New Zealand that caps domestic prices. But they point in opposite directions of travel, earn money from a different product mix, and offer different (indirect) ways in for a public investor. That contrast is the reason to read the group as a whole rather than either leaf alone.

Convenient fact for framing: USDA (the U.S. Department of Agriculture) surveys these two animals together in a single annual report, Sheep and Goats, and again together in the Census of Agriculture — so the classification and the government's own data collection line up neatly at this level.[1][2]

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1. Overview

Sheep and goat farming together are a rounding error next to U.S. cattle, hogs, or poultry — roughly 7.5 million head of animals combined at the start of 2026, versus tens of millions of cattle and hogs — and they account for well under 1% of total U.S. livestock cash receipts.[1][3] Both are overwhelmingly private industries of small, mostly non-commercial family flocks and herds; neither has a pure-play company on any U.S. exchange.

What makes the group interesting is that its two halves are moving apart:

• Sheep (11241) is the larger of the two by animal count but is in a long secular decline — the national flock has shrunk from more than 50 million head in the 1880s to about 5 million today, and lamb has slipped to roughly one pound of per-capita consumption a year. Its one bright spot is a historic 2025–2026 run-up in lamb prices that has temporarily restored producer margins.[3][10]
• Goats (11242) is the smaller half by animal count but is a rare structural-growth story inside U.S. livestock: the herd is rising, domestic production cannot keep up with demand, and immigration from goat-eating cultures keeps pulling consumption higher.[2][5]

So an investor looks at 1124 and sees a shrinking-but-cyclically-hot business bolted to a small-but-growing one, both of them fragmented, private, and import-constrained.

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2. What's inside — the two child industries and how they differ

NAICS 1124 splits into exactly two five-digit industries, each of which (unusually) contains a single six-digit national industry of the same name — so 11241 = 112410 and 11242 = 112420, and there is no further branching to reconcile.

Share of the level (by inventory, January 1, 2026):

Sheep is the bigger animal population, but because sheep are declining (~-1% year over year) and goats are growing (~+1%), the group's center of gravity is slowly tilting toward goats over time.[1][2] Note the reversal when you count farms instead of animals: the 2022 Census recorded 118,703 farms with goats versus fewer than 89,000 with sheep — more goat farms, fewer goats — which tells you goat herds are even smaller per operation than sheep flocks.[2]

How they contrast:

They also share a great deal: both are grazing businesses with structural import competition from Australia/New Zealand that sets a price ceiling; both concentrate demand in immigrant and religious communities with holiday price spikes (the two Eids, Easter, Passover); both are adding a small, fast-growing grazing-as-a-service line (renting animals for solar-site and wildfire-fuel vegetation control); and both are largely invisible in conventional business statistics.[3][4][5][17]

For full detail on either — sub-industry economics, company maps, and the exclusions (e.g., lamb/goat slaughter 311611, textile mills 313) — see the 11241 and 11242 primers.

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3. Size (this level's rollup figures + undercount caveat)

We have no ingested federal stat-metrics stored for node 1124 — our ground-truth file for this industry group carries no stat_metrics at all, and neither child node did either. That is expected: standard federal business series (Census Bureau County Business Patterns, Statistics of U.S. Businesses, Nonemployer Statistics) explicitly exclude crop and animal production (NAICS 11), so establishment, firm, employment, payroll, and receipts figures are simply not published for these industries.[12] The authoritative counts come from the USDA Census of Agriculture and the annual Sheep and Goats survey, cited in the child primers.

Rolling the two children up:

• Combined inventory: about 7.5 million head on January 1, 2026 — ~4.99 million sheep and ~2.51 million goats.[1][2]
• Operations: fewer than 89,000 farms with sheep and 118,703 with goats in the 2022 Census. These cannot be simply added — many mixed operations keep both — but the group clearly spans well over one hundred thousand mostly tiny farms.[2]
• Farm-gate value (goats): goats sold for about $270.2 million at the farm gate in 2022; only ~59,625 of the 118,703 goat farms sold any animals at all, roughly $4,500 per selling farm.[2]
• Farm-gate value (sheep): our sources do not give a clean, directly comparable lamb-and-wool farm-gate cash-receipts figure, so we do not compute a combined group total and will not invent one. For scale, an industry study put the sheep production sector near $1.4 billion in economy-wide output (a broader concept than farm-gate receipts), and shorn wool was worth about $28.7 million in 2025.[3][11]
• Context: sheep and goats together are under 1% of U.S. livestock cash receipts — a genuine niche.[3]

Undercount caveat (and which way it cuts). Because most sheep and goats are kept in very small or non-commercial flocks and herds, and because farm production falls outside conventional business statistics, any "industry size" built from business registrations badly understates activity while overstating how commercial the average operation is (about 92% of goat farms are family/individually owned; most sell little or nothing).[2][12] The undercount also cuts a second way: much of the value lives downstream and abroad — imported meat, and milk turned into artisan cheese — outside these farming codes, so the farm-gate figures understate the broader sheep-and-goat economy. Treat the USDA head counts and operation counts as ground truth, and read the dollar figures as farm-gate only.

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4. Investable universe (where value concentrates across the children)

There is no U.S.-listed pure-play in either child, so at the group level value is best mapped by where the accessible economics sit — and it sits in different places for the two animals.

• Sheep — value concentrates in scarce processing and branded lamb. The production base is un-consolidatable, but the processing/branding layer is concentrated: Superior Farms (employee-owned via an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, or ESOP) handles roughly one-third of USDA-inspected lamb and works with 1,000+ family ranchers.[8] Public proxies are all diffuse: diversified global protein (JBS, Pilgrim's Pride), farmland real-estate investment trusts, or REITs (Farmland Partners, Gladstone Land — overwhelmingly cropland), farm-supply retail (Tractor Supply) as a rural-lifestyle proxy, and Australia/New Zealand ag names (Elders, GrainCorp) tied to the sheepmeat complex.
• Goats — value concentrates downstream in dairy, and it is mostly foreign-listed. The named public names are specialty-cheese groups that own U.S. goat-dairy brands: Emmi AG (Switzerland; owns Meyenberg, Cypress Grove, Redwood Hill), Saputo (Canada; Montchevre, sourcing from 400+ Midwestern family farms), Savencia (France), plus micro-cap Bubs Australia in goat-milk infant formula.[9] Meat-goat ranching itself has no dominant player and no public vehicle.

Common ground for both: farmland REITs and agribusiness ETFs (e.g., VanEck Agribusiness, MOO) give diffuse land/input exposure with no sheep or goat tilt; there is no sheep ETF and no goat ETF. See each child primer's Section 4 for the full company tables. (Tickers and specific vehicles are named here and in Section 10; earlier sections deliberately keep to the economics.)

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5. How the money works

Both are commodity-grazing businesses, but the profit equation differs by animal, so there is no single group-wide margin series — profitability is underwritten operation by operation.

• Sheep: the core equation is marketable lambs per breeding ewe × realized lamb price − annual cost per ewe. The biggest lever is the lambing/weaning rate (about 105 lambs per 100 ewes in 2025), because ewe upkeep is largely fixed; costs are dominated by feed/hay, public-land grazing fees (per animal-unit-month, or AUM), H-2A herder labor, shearing, veterinary/scrapie compliance, and predator losses. Wool is a secondary, globally priced commodity that often barely covers the cost of shearing. Lamb is thinly traded, so prices swing hard — negotiated live slaughter lamb reached about $262/cwt (hundredweight) in April 2026, up ~53% year over year, versus a ~$174/cwt average in 2024.[3][10]
• Goats: the equation splits by purpose. Meat goats are a low-input grazing play (kids weaned per doe × weight × price) that survives by selling live into the premium ethnic/halal market rather than competing with cheap imported frozen meat. Dairy goats capture value in the creamery, not the barn — raw milk is nearly worthless; cheese/yogurt/soap carry the margin, and processing capacity is a genuine bottleneck. Mohair is a tiny niche capped by a shortage of shearers.[5][9]
• Shared upside line: both increasingly bill for grazing-as-a-service — flocks and herds rented for solar-array vegetation control and wildfire-fuel reduction, one of the faster-growing revenue lines for each.[17]
• Policy backstops: the Farm Bill provides marketing-assistance loans for both wool and mohair, plus subsidized predator control and disaster programs — a modest cushion, not a driver.[11]

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6. Demand drivers

• Ethnic and religious consumption is the demand engine on the meat side of both animals. Domestic lamb and goat demand concentrates in immigrant and faith communities (Hispanic, Caribbean, African, South Asian, Middle Eastern) and observant Muslim, Jewish, and Christian consumers, with sharp seasonal spikes around the two Eids, Easter, Passover, and Christmas for specific weights and freshly slaughtered animals — exactly the segment imported frozen meat cannot serve. Industry surveys attribute ~36% of U.S. goat-meat demand to these communities.[3][5]
• The growth stories diverge. Goat meat is a structural growth category — immigration from goat-eating regions keeps lifting demand, foodservice adoption rose ~22% from 2020 to 2024, and domestic supply stays chronically short.[5] Lamb is the opposite: per-capita consumption has fallen from nearly 5 pounds in the 1960s to about 1 pound, so domestic sheep producers compete on freshness, local sourcing, and "American Lamb" branding rather than on a growing pie.[3]
• Imports define both markets and cap both prices. Australia (and, for lamb, New Zealand) supply the majority of the meat Americans eat in each category; 2017 U.S. goat-meat imports alone were roughly twice domestic production, Australia >95%.[4][6]
• Goat dairy adds a second, premium-driven demand pool — artisan cheese, perceived digestibility, soap/cosmetics, and a small infant-formula segment — riding the broad U.S. shift toward cheese and yogurt.[16]
• Grazing services ride solar buildout and wildfire-mitigation spending for both animals.[17]

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7. Regulation

Both animals face essentially the same regime, light at the farm gate and stricter once product moves to market:

• Scrapie eradication (USDA-APHIS). The National Scrapie Eradication Program (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service) applies to both sheep and goats — official ear-tag identification for animals moving off-premises.[13]
• Meat inspection (USDA-FSIS). Lamb and goat are "amenable" species under the Federal Meat Inspection Act; commercially sold meat must come from a Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS)-inspected (or equivalent state) plant, and the shortage of small inspected slaughter capacity is a real constraint for both.[14]
• Labor (H-2A). Sheep ranching in particular relies on the H-2A range-herder rule; a 2024 Department of Labor rule tightened terms (enforcement suspended in mid-2025).[15]
• Public-lands grazing. Western range sheep depend on Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service permits and per-AUM fees.[3]
• Milk safety (FDA / states). Goat-dairy adds the Food and Drug Administration's Pasteurized Milk Ordinance for Grade "A" channels, plus a state-by-state raw-milk patchwork.[16]
• Fiber support (Farm Bill). Marketing-assistance loans cover wool and mohair alike.[11]

There are no mandatory USDA quality grades for goat meat comparable to those for lamb. See each child primer for the full detail.

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8. Consolidation

The pattern is the same at the farm gate and different downstream:

• Production is essentially unconsolidatable for both. Tens of thousands of tiny, mostly non-employer operations, no roll-up economics, and — for goats especially — no dominant national producer. Land, grazing permits, labor, and animal biology cap how fast anyone can scale a flock or herd.[2][8]
• Sheep consolidation has happened in processing. Capacity is concentrated (Superior Farms handles ~1/3 of inspected lamb) and fragile — Mountain States Rosen's 2020 bankruptcy showed how a single plant closure can strand producers regionally. Further M&A is likeliest in processing, case-ready/branded lamb, and distribution.[8]
• Goat consolidation has happened downstream and abroad, in dairy. Premium goat-dairy brands were bought by large foreign processors — Emmi (Swiss), Saputo (Canadian), Savencia (French) — plus the U.S. cooperative Land O'Lakes; on the supply side, goat meat has effectively consolidated in Australia's large-scale export processors. Future M&A is far likelier among creameries, brands, and distributors than among farms.[9]

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9. Risks

Shared across the group:

• Structural import competition from Australia/New Zealand sets a price ceiling on both lamb and goat meat; the domestic moat is only the narrow live/fresh/halal niche imports can't serve.[4][6]
• Thin, volatile markets — small animals, high per-unit cost, holiday-driven price swings, mostly part-time operators.
• Processing and infrastructure bottlenecks — too few inspected slaughter plants (both) and too little goat-milk processing/cold-chain capacity limit value capture.[8][16]
• Animal-health and predator losses — coyotes and other predators for sheep; internal parasites and predation for goats; disease and scrapie-compliance costs for both.
• Labor, feed, forage, and public-land/water access — H-2A availability and cost (sheep), shearer shortage (wool and mohair), drought and purchased hay.[11][15]
• Illiquidity and succession — no established M&A market for sheep or goat farms (as opposed to processing or cheese brands); public-market exposure is basis-risk-laden proxies, not the real thing.

Split by animal: sheep carries a slow secular decline that caps cyclical upside and persistently weak wool prices, and its current record lamb prices are expected to normalize (USDA's outlook sees ~$252.50/cwt slaughter lamb in 2027, below spring-2026 spot highs — so today's prices should not be capitalized as permanent).[10] Goats depend on continued immigration-driven demand and on the country staying import-short — a favorable but externally driven backdrop.[5]

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10. How to invest and outlook

Both children are private-first, and the public proxies differ. For sheep, indirect public routes are diversified protein (JBS, Pilgrim's Pride), farmland REITs (Farmland Partners, FPI; Gladstone Land, LAND), farm-supply retail (Tractor Supply, TSCO), and Australia/NZ ag (Elders, GrainCorp). For goats, they are foreign-listed specialty dairy (Emmi, SIX: EMMN; Saputo, TSX: SAP; Savencia, Euronext: SAVE) plus micro-cap Bubs Australia (ASX: BUB). Agribusiness ETFs (e.g., VanEck Agribusiness, MOO) span both with no small-ruminant tilt. None is a clean bet on U.S. sheep or goat economics, and there is no sheep or goat ETF.[8][9]

The real exposure is private, and the accessible bottlenecks differ. In sheep: direct flock/ranch/feedlot ownership (best understood as a farmland investment with a livestock enterprise attached), lamb-finishing capacity, and the scarce processing/branded-lamb layer. In goats: milk aggregation, branded dairy, inspected slaughter, cold-chain distribution, meat-goat ranching, and seedstock/genetics. Cross-cutting both: farmland funds/crowdfunding, livestock-secured or land-backed private credit, and grazing-service contracts. Due diligence in either case should center on normalized cash flow after feed, labor, veterinary costs, mortality, freight, shearing, land rent, and interest, plus scrutiny of grazing permits, processor/creamery contracts, and flock/herd records.[17]

Outlook. The two halves offer different clocks. Sheep is riding a historic but cyclical lamb-price high that has restored margins and could seed a modest flock rebuild — attractive right now, but not to be extrapolated. Goats offer a genuinely favorable, slow-building structural demand tailwind — but the same import dependence that feeds it also caps domestic prices, and fragmentation, thin margins, and infrastructure gaps mean it will not scale fast or throw off a public champion. For 1124 as a whole, the near-term margin story sits in lamb while the long-run growth tilt sits in goats — and for most investors it remains a private, specialist, land-and-lifestyle corner of agriculture rather than a liquid public opportunity. For the complete analysis, see the 11241 Sheep Farming and 11242 Goat Farming primers.

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Sources

(Drawn from the 11241 and 11242 child primers and renumbered for this page. This four-digit industry group has no separately ingested stat-metrics in our dataset, so all figures trace to the underlying USDA and industry sources below.)

1. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), Sheep and Goats (January 2026) — sheep 4.99M head, goats 2.51M head on January 1, 2026. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/reports/shep0126.pdf
2. USDA NASS, 2022 Census of Agriculture, Volume 1, Chapter 1 (United States) — goats 118,703 farms / 2,529,599 head, 59,625 farms sold for $270.187M, ~92% family/individually owned; sheep fewer than 89,000 farms. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022/Full_Report/Volume_1,_Chapter_1_US/usv1.pdf
3. USDA Economic Research Service (ERS), Sheep, Lamb & Mutton — Sector at a Glance, 2026. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/sheep-lamb-mutton/sector-at-a-glance
4. USDA ERS, Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry Outlook (LDP-M-289), 2018 — 2017 U.S. goat-meat imports >46M lb (~2× domestic production), Australia >95% of imports. https://ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/outlooks/89615/LDPM-289.pdf
5. Meat & Livestock Australia, 2024 Global Goat Snapshot — U.S. ethnic-community demand share ~36%; foodservice growth ~22% (2020–24). https://www.mla.com.au/news-and-events/industry-news/2024-global-goat-snapshot-released/
6. American Sheep Industry Association, Overview of Lamb and Mutton Imports, 2025 (Australia ~75% / New Zealand ~24% of U.S. lamb imports). https://www.sheepusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/ASI-Trade-One-Pager-on-Lamb-and-Mutton-Imports-final.pdf
7. U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Small Business Size Standards (NAICS 112410 sheep = $3.5M; 112420 goat = $2.5M average annual receipts), 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
8. Superior Farms, Our Story (employee-owned ESOP; ~1/3 of USDA-inspected lamb; 1,000+ family ranchers), 2025. https://superiorfarms.com/our-story/
9. DairyReporter / Just-Food / Emmi Group and Saputo Inc., U.S. goat-dairy brand ownership — Emmi (Meyenberg, Cypress Grove, Redwood Hill), Saputo (Montchevre, 400+ Midwestern farms), Savencia; Bubs Australia (ASX: BUB) investor materials. https://www.just-food.com/news/emmi-owned-us-goat-dairies-merge-into-darey-brands/
10. Michigan State University Extension, Lamb prices start off strong in 2026 (citing USDA slaughter/price data; live slaughter lamb ~$262/cwt April 2026), and USDA ERS Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry Outlook, May 2026 (2027 slaughter-lamb ~$252.50/cwt). https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/lamb-prices-start-off-strong-in-2026; https://ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/outlooks/114167/LDP-M-383.pdf
11. American Sheep Industry Association (D. Marsh), U.S. Sheep Industry Economic Contribution Analysis (2021 data), November 2023 (production sector ~$1.4B output; wool ~$28.7M in 2025); Texas State Historical Association, Wool and Mohair Industry (Farm Bill wool/mohair marketing loans; shearer shortage). https://www.sheepusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/U.S.-Sheep-Industry-Contribution-Analysis-Nov.-2023.pdf
12. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns — Methodology (excludes crop and animal production, NAICS 11). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/technical-documentation/methodology.html
13. USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), National Scrapie Eradication Program (mandatory ID for sheep and goats). https://www.aphis.usda.gov/animal-disease/sheep-goat/scrapie-tag
14. USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), Inspection of Meat Products (Federal Meat Inspection Act) — lamb and goat as amenable species. https://www.fsis.usda.gov/inspection/inspection-meat-products
15. U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration, H-2A Herder Final Rule (Range Herding or Production of Livestock), 2024. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/programs/h-2a/herding
16. Grand View Research, U.S. Goat Milk Products Market (cheese largest slice; limited processing capacity; FDA Pasteurized Milk Ordinance context). https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/goat-milk-products-market-report
17. Silicon Ranch, Replicating Agrivoltaics in a Big Way (solar grazing), 2024; and WallStreetZen, Best Farmland REITs, ETFs and Stocks (Farmland Partners, Gladstone Land, VanEck Agribusiness / MOO). https://www.siliconranch.com/stories/replicating-agrivoltaics-in-a-big-way/; https://www.wallstreetzen.com/blog/farmland-reit/