Other Animal Production (NAICS 2022 · 1129) — U.S. Industry-Group Primer

A rollup primer. NAICS (North American Industry Classification System — the standard code set the U.S., Canada, and Mexico use to sort businesses) 2022 code 1129, a four-digit industry group inside subsector 112 (Animal Production and Aquaculture). It contains four five-digit industries: 11291 Apiculture, 11292 Horses and Other Equine Production, 11293 Fur-Bearing Animal and Rabbit Production, and 11299 All Other Animal Production. This page synthesizes across those four; each has its own primer for the detail.

1. Overview

Subsector 112 (livestock) is organized around America's big dedicated animal businesses — cattle (1121), hogs (1122), poultry and eggs (1123), sheep and goats (1124), and aquaculture (1125). NAICS 1129 is the residual group that collects everything else: the bees, the horses, the fur animals and rabbits, and a catch-all bucket of bison, farmed deer, alpacas, companion animals, insects, and laboratory mice. It is a category defined by not fitting anywhere else, so its four children share almost nothing operationally.[1]

That makes 1129 an unusual "industry" to analyze: it is really four separate small economies bolted together by a classification number, and the investor's job is to tell them apart. They differ on every axis that matters — size, growth direction, who owns them, and how (or whether) you can buy in:

• Horses (11292) is the largest by direct farm sales — a long-cycle luxury/discretionary market where a few elite animals carry the value.
• Apiculture (11291) is a small farm business with an outsized systemic role: it pollinates tens of billions of dollars of other crops.
• All Other (11299) is a filing cabinet whose one serious drawer — laboratory-animal breeding — holds nearly all of the group's analyzable public-market value.
• Fur and rabbit (11293) is a structurally declining commodity producer, the smallest and the only one in terminal contraction.

For most investors the common thread is that the production layer is almost entirely private — family farms, ranches, co-ops, and small operators — with public exposure available cleanly in only one corner (lab animals, via one company). The rest is a "know-it, don't-own-it" set of industries you access, if at all, through private ownership or indirect downstream proxies.

2. What's inside — the four children and how they differ

This is the heart of the page. The four children diverge sharply. The table below compares them; each row's figures are drawn from that child's primer and cited there.

Shares are indicative, not additive: the children are measured in different years and on different bases — Census of Agriculture sales value (horses, fur, rabbits, bison), NASS annual receipts (honey/pollination), and assembled market estimates (lab animals) — and there is no single federal total for 1129 (see §3). Read the ranking as orders of magnitude, not precise percentages.

Two contrasts are worth holding onto. By direct farm sales, horses dominate — on the order of two-thirds to three-quarters of the group's measurable production value sits in 11292, with apiculture a distant second and fur/rabbit a rounding error. By analyzable public-market value, the ranking inverts: 11299's laboratory-animal segment is the only piece with a scaled, listed proxy, so a public-equity investor's attention lands almost entirely on the group's third-largest child. The two things investors usually conflate — where the output is and where the investable value is — point at different children here.

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

Our ground-truth federal statistics file for NAICS 1129 is empty — there are no ingested stat_metrics for this node. We state that plainly rather than manufacture a figure. Every number on this page is carried up from a child primer and labeled to its cited public source.

There is also no single official "1129" total to carry up, for a structural reason that applies to the whole group: the U.S. business-statistics programs investors normally reach for — the Economic Census, County Business Patterns, and Nonemployer Statistics — exclude crop and animal production (NAICS 111 and 112) entirely.[13] So the establishment/receipts/payroll series simply do not measure this group. Size has to be assembled animal-by-animal from USDA's Census of Agriculture (every five years) and annual NASS surveys, plus commercial market research for the lab-animal slice — which is exactly why the children's figures sit in different years and on different bases and cannot be cleanly summed.

Assembled from the children, the picture is:

Rough magnitude: the direct U.S. farm-gate output of the whole group is a low-single-digit-billions business — dominated by the ~$2.24B horse figure, with everything else adding well under a billion. That understates the group's real economic weight in two directions, which is the key caveat.

Undercount caveat (large here, and it cuts both ways). Three of the four children are dominated by small, individual, family, or hobby ownership below survey thresholds, so any register-based count materially undercounts the true population:

• Apiculture is mostly non-employer farm proprietors and hobby keepers.[3]
• The Census of Agriculture only counts equines on farms that sell (or would sell) $1,000+ of product, missing millions of recreational horses; the industry's own tally (American Horse Council) estimates ~6.65 million horses and a ~$177 billion total economic contribution once the off-farm service and spending economy is included — versus the ~$2.24B of direct production this group actually measures.[4-AHC]
• Rabbit is dominated by tiny rabbitries below thresholds.[4]

At the same time, the lab-animal slice of 11299 shows up cleanly — but mostly through the public filings of a few dominant firms, not through farm statistics. Net: do not treat any assembled total as a complete addressable market; the group is under-measured on the farm side and its economically serious pieces (pollination services, research-animal supply) live largely outside the farm-sales figures.

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

The single most important fact for a public-market investor: there is exactly one scaled U.S.-listed pure-ish play across all four children, and it sits in the group's third-largest child. Everything else is private or accessed by indirect proxy. Value concentrates very differently in each child.

Where the public value is:

• 11299 — laboratory animals. Charles River Laboratories (NYSE: CRL) is the only scaled listed proxy in the entire group. Its Research Models & Services segment generated $829.4M in 2024 (~20% of a ~$4.05B company) — you are buying a diversified drug-development-services firm, not a livestock play.[9] Inotiv (OTC: NOTVQ) is a direct but distressed research-model name (prepackaged Chapter 11 in 2026).[9-INO]
• 11292 — horses. No listed producer; only indirect exposure to the horse population — racing/gaming (Churchill Downs, NASDAQ: CHDN), animal health/diagnostics (Zoetis, NYSE: ZTS; IDEXX, NASDAQ: IDXX), rural retail (Tractor Supply, NASDAQ: TSCO).[11]
• 11291 — apiculture. No U.S. pure play; closest listed names are foreign/adjacent (Comvita, NZX: CVT) or the downstream crop/food companies that depend on rented bees.[10]
• 11293 — fur and rabbit. No U.S. producer; a thinly traded Finnish auction house (Saga Furs, Nasdaq Helsinki: SAGCV) is the only proxy, and it faces the same secular decline.[8]

Where the private value is: the production layer of all four. In horses, the top-heavy Kentucky Thoroughbred breeding complex and bloodstock auction houses (Keeneland, Fasig-Tipton); in apiculture, large migratory operators, roll-ups, and beekeeper co-ops; in lab animals, private/nonprofit breeders (The Jackson Laboratory, Taconic, Marshall BioResources); in bison, Turner Enterprises and tribal herds. The common pattern: value pools where customers pay for genetics, biosecurity, logistics, and regulatory standing — which is why lab animals scale into a real industry while the rest stays local, fragmented, and passion-driven.

Tickers, yields, and multiples belong to the company-level analysis; none of these public names is a bet on 1129 production itself.

5. How the money works

Because the children are unrelated businesses, owners earn returns in four fundamentally different ways — and the group has no shared economic model (do not force utility rate base, REIT funds-from-operations, or mining all-in-sustaining-cost language on any of them; these are farm, luxury-asset, and industrial-supply businesses):

1. Horses — long-cycle luxury asset. A few animals carry the returns. Profit engines are stud fees (a top Thoroughbred stallion stood for $250,000/mare in 2024–25), weanling/yearling auctions (Keeneland's 2025 September sale set a record $531.5M), and pinhooking, against continuous carrying costs and a bimodal sale price where most breeders lose money and profit pools at the commercial top.[7] An 11-month gestation plus 2–3 years to the track means the industry always breeds to a market it can't yet see — structural cyclicality.
2. Apiculture — seasonal, biological, contract-driven farming. Two revenue engines from the same colonies: pollination rentals (the anchor — almonds alone are ~81% of U.S. pollination receipts at ~$181/colony) and honey (yield × price), plus live-bee/genetics sales. The defining cost is colony replacement — beekeepers lose a large share of colonies every year and must rebuild.[3]
3. Lab animals (within 11299) — recurring industrial supply. Purpose-bred, genetically defined, health-monitored animals sold on repeat, layered with services. Economics are volume × price with real pricing power in specialty models and non-human primates (NHPs); NHP pricing is the volatile swing factor (Charles River's model-segment operating margin fell to 13.8% in 2024 from 19.5% in 2023).[9] Bison and cervids elsewhere in 11299 run on slow, land-heavy, supply-constrained cow-calf-style economics.[5]
4. Fur and rabbit — price-taking commodity. Mink reduces to pelts × auction price against a fixed cost base, with one annual biological cycle committing the herd almost a year before price is known; brutally cyclical (~$94/pelt in 2011 to ~$21 in 2019).[8]

The unifying theme across all four is biological inventory: breeding cycles cap how fast supply can grow, and disease or mortality can destroy inventory suddenly. Useful metrics span survival/breeding rates, genetic quality, revenue per breeding unit, customer concentration, and — for apiculture specifically — overwinter colony-survival rate, the number that usually decides the year.

6. Demand drivers

Demand is end-market-specific, with almost no overlap:

• Horses: discretionary income and wealth (a want, not a need); racing purses now propped up by casino/gaming subsidies (historical-horse-racing machines, slots, sports betting) as pari-mutuel handle keeps falling; recreation and sport participation; premium bloodstock demand.[7]
• Apiculture: pollination-dependent acreage (100+ pollinator-reliant crops, ~a third of the U.S. diet), colony scarcity from high winter losses, honey consumption against imports (which have exceeded domestic output every year since 2005), and growing bee-health demand.[3][4-ERS]
• Lab animals (11299): biopharma R&D budgets, preclinical pipelines, NIH/academic funding, and outsourcing to contract research organizations — offset by a genuine structural headwind, the regulatory push toward New Approach Methodologies (organ-on-chip, organoids, in-silico models) that reduce animal testing.[6] Bison/venison demand is supply-constrained "better-for-you" protein.[5]
• Fur and rabbit: mink demand is downstream and mostly offshore (luxury apparel, concentrated in Asia), hit by luxury brands going fur-free and by faux-fur substitution; rabbit is a domestic niche (specialty cuisine, fiber arts, research/pet).[8]

7. Regulation

Each child carries its own distinct regime; there is no single regulator for 1129. USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) is the one thread that touches most of it (animal movement, welfare, disease), but the substance differs sharply:

• Horses (11292): APHIS administers the Horse Protection Act (bans "soring"), the Animal Welfare Act, and interstate/import rules; the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act of 2020 (HISA) added Federal Trade Commission–overseen safety and anti-doping (litigated to the Supreme Court, operative for now); plus the IRS hobby-loss rule (§183) and the domestic-slaughter ban.[7-HISA][17]
• Apiculture (11291): trade/antidumping orders on imported raw honey are the industry's most consequential rule (imports set the domestic price); EPA regulates bee-relevant pesticides and varroa treatments; FDA/USDA govern labeling and the honey check-off; APHIS restricts bee imports.[15]
• Lab animals/cervids (11299): the Animal Welfare Act (which notably excludes rats, mice, and birds bred for research — the highest-volume lab animals), NIH's IACUC oversight for federally funded work, Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) controls for farmed deer/elk, and wildlife-trafficking/import law for research primates. The single most important long-run factor is the FDA's move to phase out animal-testing requirements (FDA Modernization Act 2.0; April 2025 roadmap).[6-FDA]
• Fur and rabbit (11293): no federal on-farm welfare standard for fur animals; the FTC Fur Products Labeling Act; state fur-sale bans (California AB 44, Oregon HB 2924) though no state bans mink farming; rabbit meat is a non-amenable species with only voluntary USDA inspection; disease (SARS-CoV-2/H5N1 in mink, RHDV2 in rabbits) is a live regulatory driver.[17]

8. Consolidation

The children run in opposite directions, which is the defining structural contrast:

• 11292 Horses — shrinking and premiumizing. The registered North American Thoroughbred foal crop was ~18,000 in 2024, the smallest since 1964 and less than half the 2005 peak; the elite stallion market and auction volume concentrate at the top, while the recreational/sport base stays fragmented across hundreds of thousands of small farms.[7]
• 11291 Apiculture — top-heavy and consolidating via acquisitions (packer roll-ups), backward integration (almond growers buying beekeepers to secure pollination), and technology (sensor/robotic hives), though a large private middle market persists.[3]
• 11299 Lab animals — concentrated and consolidating behind high barriers (proprietary genetics, biosecurity, regulatory standing, NHP import licenses), with Charles River leading and a distressed number-two; the rest of 11299 (bison, cervids, camelids, insects) stays fragmented.[9]
• 11293 Fur — secular contraction, not competition. Mink farms more than halved (236→110, 2017→2022) as marginal operators exit below break-even, and marketing infrastructure has thinned (North American Fur Auctions collapsed; Kopenhagen Fur winding down). Rabbit stays fragmented.[8]

9. Risks

Group-wide, biological and measurement risk are common; the rest is child-specific:

• Biological/disease — universal and sometimes existential. Catastrophic honey-bee colony loss (a survey estimated 55.6% of managed U.S. colonies died April 2024–April 2025, the worst on record); CWD for cervids; colony biosecurity for lab breeders; equine disease/injury; SARS-CoV-2/H5N1 in mink and RHDV2 in rabbits. Biological inventory can vanish suddenly.[14][8]
• Structural demand risk — but pointing different ways. Terminal decline for fur; slow erosion in racing (falling handle, shrinking foal crop); a regulatory headwind (non-animal methods) against the lab-animal segment; while pollination demand is structurally secure and bison demand outruns supply.
• Price/cycle and input risk. Long production lags amplify boom-bust everywhere (the alpaca bubble is the cautionary tale); feed, labor, fuel, land, and (for honey and mink) world price/trade exposure.
• Concentration, liquidity, and data risk for investors. Private horses, ranches, and farms lack continuous prices; there is essentially one quality public proxy for the whole group (Charles River), and federal business statistics materially understate the group — so size and trend judgments must lean on USDA agricultural data, not the Census business series.[13]

10. How to invest & outlook

Public routes are narrow and lopsided. Across all four children there is essentially one scaled listed way in — Charles River (NYSE: CRL) — and it is a life-sciences services company where research-model breeding is only ~a fifth of revenue.[9] Everything else public is indirect: horse-adjacent racing/gaming, animal-health, and rural-retail names (CHDN, ZTS, IDXX, TSCO); apiculture-adjacent crop/food and foreign honey names (CVT); and a thinly traded fur auction house (SAGCV). None is a pure bet on 1129 production, and no ETF or index targets the group.[10][11][8]

Private routes are how you actually own the production layer, and they differ by child:

• Horses: racehorse partnerships/syndicates, broodmares and stallion shares, farm ownership or private credit — expect illiquidity, high carrying costs, and the IRS hobby-loss test.
• Apiculture: owning/financing a commercial beekeeping operation, backing bee-health technology, or acquiring honey brands — diligence centers on overwinter survival rate.
• Lab animals (11299): growth capital or venture into research-model/CRO/insect operators (highest-quality private pool in the group).
• Fur/rabbit: a difficult allocation — a capital-intensive, deeply cyclical, declining bet on the mink side; low-barrier but thin-margin on rabbit.

Outlook (forward-looking judgment, not reported fact). The group is best read as four independent trajectories: horses drift toward a smaller, more concentrated, more premium production industry; apiculture is structurally secure in its pollination role even as colony mortality and imports pressure the economics; the lab-animal core of 11299 faces a soft near term and a slow secular headwind from non-animal methods but remains central to biology; and fur continues its terminal decline while rabbit persists as a stable niche. The practical takeaway mirrors the group's own definition — treat 1129 not as one industry but as a drawer of four, open them separately, and recognize that for public-market capital only one drawer (lab animals) is genuinely investable while the rest is private, indirect, or off-limits. For the full segment detail, see the four child primers (11291, 11292, 11293, 11299).

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Sources

Synthesized from the four child primers (11291, 11292, 11293, 11299); numbering is this page's own, mapped to the underlying cited sources.

1. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS — Subsector 112 (Animal Production and Aquaculture) and industry group 1129 (definitions and scope). https://www.census.gov/naics/?year=2022
2. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), 2022 Census of Agriculture, Vol. 1, Ch. 2, Table 18 — Equine: Inventory and Sales (horses & ponies sales ~$2.24B; 372,810 farms; 2.41M head; 2017→2022 decline). https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022/Full_Report/Volume_1,_Chapter_2_US_State_Level/st99_2_018_018.pdf
3. USDA NASS, Honey (released March 2026; 2025 honey production value $352.9M, pollination income $224.7M, other bee income $48.0M, colonies 2.41M, price +27%). https://esmis.nal.usda.gov/sites/default/release-files/795818/hony0326.pdf
4. USDA NASS, 2022 Census of Agriculture — Other Animals and Animal Products, U.S. Data (~74,000 bee-colony farms / ~3.8M colonies; rabbits 6,400 farms, 438,955 sold for $8.571M; mink 110 farms). https://www.nass.usda.gov/agcensus/ - 4-AHC. American Horse Council Foundation, 2023 National Equine Economic Impact Study (~6.65M horses; ~$177B total economic contribution; ~2.2M jobs). https://horsecouncil.org/economic-impact-study/ - 4-ERS. USDA Economic Research Service (ERS), Honey Bees on the Move / Cost of Pollination (almond fee ~$181/colony; ~81% of U.S. pollination receipts; >100 pollinator-dependent crops; imports > domestic since 2005). https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/112782
5. USDA NASS, 2022 Census of Agriculture — bison and other livestock inventory; National Bison Association, Bison by the Numbers (192,477 head on 1,986 ranches, plus ~11,000 in federal herds). https://nationalbison.org/bison-by-the-numbers/
6. Precedence Research / Grand View Research, Animal Model Market (global ~$2.4B, 2024; mice and rats ~95% of units); U.S. FDA, Plan to Phase Out Animal Testing Requirement for Monoclonal Antibodies and Other Drugs (April 2025; FDA Modernization Act 2.0). https://www.precedenceresearch.com/animal-model-market; https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-announces-plan-phase-out-animal-testing-requirement-monoclonal-antibodies-and-other-drugs
7. The Jockey Club / BloodHorse, 2024 Live Foal Statistics (~18,000 foals, smallest since 1964); Keeneland, September 2025 Record $531.5M Sale; Spendthrift/BloodHorse, Into Mischief $250K stud fee 2024–25. - 7-HISA. Federal Trade Commission, Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority Rules (HISA framework, FTC oversight; Supreme Court remand 2025). https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/hisa/hisa-rules
8. USDA NASS, Mink (released July 2025; 2024 crop 771,200 pelts worth $28.1M, avg $36.40; ~80% decline from 2014 peak; survey discontinued); Humane World for Animals (mink farms 236→110, 2017→2022); Saga Furs Oyj (Nasdaq Helsinki: SAGCV) financial disclosures. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/reports/mink0725.pdf
9. Charles River Laboratories, Q4 & Full-Year 2024 Results and Form 10-K (Research Models & Services revenue $829.4M of ~$4.05B; RMS operating margin 13.8% vs 19.5% in 2023). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1100682/000110068226000022/crl-20251227.htm - 9-INO. Inotiv, Inc., Form 8-K — Plan of Reorganization (prepackaged Chapter 11, 2026; OTC: NOTVQ). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/720154/000162828026048369/notv-20260714.htm
10. Comvita Limited (NZX: CVT), Investor Centre; National Honey Board, Honey Industry Facts. https://comvita.co.nz/pages/investor-centre
11. Churchill Downs Inc. (NASDAQ: CHDN); Zoetis Inc. (NYSE: ZTS) Form 10-K (equine revenue ~$285M); IDEXX Laboratories (NASDAQ: IDXX); Tractor Supply Co. (NASDAQ: TSCO) Form 10-K.
12. U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Small Business Size Standards (NAICS 112910 $3.25M; 112920 $2.75M; 112930 $3.75M; 112990 $2.75M — eligibility thresholds, not industry revenue). https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
13. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns Methodology and Nonemployer Statistics FAQ (both exclude crop and animal production, NAICS 111 and 112). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/nonemployer-statistics/about/faq.html
14. Auburn University College of Agriculture / Project Apis m., U.S. Beekeeping Survey — highest honey-bee colony losses during 2024–2025 (55.6% managed-colony loss). https://agriculture.auburn.edu/feature/u-s-beekeeping-survey-reveals-highest-honeybee-colony-losses-during-2024-2025/
15. Federal Register, Raw Honey From Argentina, Brazil, India, and Vietnam: Antidumping Duty Orders (June 2022). https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/06/10/2022-12498/raw-honey-from-argentina-brazil-india-and-the-socialist-republic-of-vietnam-antidumping-duty-orders
16. USDA APHIS, Horse Protection Act, Animal Welfare Act, and interstate/import movement rules; IRS hobby-loss rule (IRC §183). https://www.aphis.usda.gov/hpa
17. Fur Free Alliance, Fur bans (California AB 44, Oregon HB 2924, both effective Jan 1, 2023); FTC, Fur Products Labeling Act; USDA FSIS, Rabbit From Farm to Table (voluntary inspection). https://www.furfreealliance.com/fur-bans/