All Other Animal Production (U.S.) — NAICS 112990

1. Overview

"All Other Animal Production" is the catch-all bin of American livestock farming. It is the code the U.S. government uses under NAICS — the North American Industry Classification System, the standard business-category set used by the U.S., Canada, and Mexico — for animals that don't fit the big, dedicated buckets (cattle, hogs, poultry, sheep and goats, fish). In practice it stitches together a handful of unrelated businesses by process of elimination: bison ranching, farmed deer and elk, llamas and alpacas, worm and insect farms, companion-animal breeding kennels, mixed-animal operations, and — the economically serious part — companies that breed laboratory mice, rats, and research monkeys for drug testing.[1]

Why anyone weighing the sector should care: almost none of this is a large or coherent "industry," but one slice is a real, high-margin, globally consolidated business — the supply of purpose-bred research animals to biopharma. That slice holds nearly all the analyzable value, and it carries unusual regulatory and reputational risk.

This is better understood as a collection of niche biological businesses than as a conventional sector. Across all of it, genetics, biosecurity, permits, disease history, and customer relationships matter more than raw scale.

Ways in differ sharply by segment. For public-market investors, exposure is indirect and narrow — essentially one scaled proxy (a research-model breeder that is part of a larger drug-services company), one small distressed name, and a couple of food/ingredient companies with emerging insect-protein arms. For private investors the field is more direct but land-heavy and illiquid: specialist breeders, research-model companies, private-equity-backed operators, and thousands of small owner-run farms and ranches. There is no bison, deer, or alpaca-farming stock to buy.

2. What it is, and what it excludes

Census defines 112990 as farms that raise animals not covered by another animal code, or that raise a mix of animals with no single family accounting for at least half of output.[1]

Illustrative members (per the Census definition): bison; farmed deer and elk (cervids); llamas and alpacas (camelids); laboratory animals (rats, mice, guinea pigs, and engineered models); companion animals raised for sale (dogs, cats, aviary birds such as parakeets, parrots, and canaries); worms and other insects; and combination animal farming.[1]

What it explicitly excludes — this matters, because several animals people assume are here have their own codes:

• Bees and honey → NAICS 112910 (apiculture)
• Horses and other equines → NAICS 112920
• Fur-bearing animals and rabbits (mink, foxes, meat/lab rabbits) → NAICS 112930
• Cattle/beef (112111), dairy (112120), hogs (1122), poultry and eggs (1123), sheep and goats (1124), and fish/shellfish farming — aquaculture (1125).[1]

Also outside the code: veterinary services, animal shelters, pet grooming/boarding, pet retail, and feed manufacturing are not "production." Only the breeding of animals for sale falls in 112990.

Ownership mix: overwhelmingly small, family-owned farms and ranches, plus thousands of hobby-scale and part-time operators (alpacas, worms, backyard breeders). Government and university animal facilities can be economically significant but are not investor-owned businesses. The lone industrial exception is laboratory-animal breeding, dominated by a few companies. So the code straddles two worlds that share nothing but a classification number: subsistence-to-lifestyle agriculture on one side, and a specialized life-sciences supply business on the other.

3. How big it is (and why the federal figures are thin)

The honest caveat comes first: standard federal business statistics barely cover this code. The Economic Census is establishment- and payroll-based and does not meaningfully enumerate farm-based animal production; Census Nonemployer Statistics explicitly exclude the entire Animal Production and Aquaculture subsector; government-owned facilities fall outside Economic Census coverage; and very small cells are withheld to protect confidentiality.[3][4] Farms are counted instead by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) Census of Agriculture, not by the business-establishment programs. So the usual metrics an analyst reaches for — establishment counts, employment, payroll — are simply not published for farm-based 112990.

Our ground-truth federal dataset for this code contains exactly one figure: the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) size standard of $2.75 million in average annual receipts — the ceiling below which a firm counts as "small" for federal programs.[2] That is an eligibility threshold, not industry revenue or market size. No Census establishment, employment, or payroll figure is available for this code; we do not have one and won't invent it.

To size the code you assemble it animal by animal from USDA and industry sources:

Undercount note: because farms are enumerated by USDA rather than by the business-statistics programs, and because most operators are tiny or part-time, this code is genuinely under-measured in the datasets investors normally use. The one part that shows up cleanly in commercial and financial data — laboratory-animal breeding — does so mostly through the public filings of the few companies that dominate it. Do not treat any available federal business total as a complete addressable market.

4. The investable universe

Public options are narrow. There is no bison, deer, camelid, or pet-breeding pure-play on any U.S. exchange, and no broad basket that tracks the code. (Tickers, valuation, and yields are reserved for this section and Section 10.)

Public companies:

Major private / non-corporate owners:

• Lab animals: The Jackson Laboratory (JAX — an independent nonprofit, the leading mouse-model supplier and repository)[15]; Taconic Biosciences (engineered models, breeding, colony management; acquired by Avista Capital Partners in 2022)[14]; and Marshall BioResources (family-owned; purpose-bred beagles, cats, ferrets, and primates)[16] — all private.
• Insects: Protix (Tyson-backed) among a small set of capital-backed producers.[18]
• Bison: Turner Enterprises (the late Ted Turner's ranches held ~45,000 head, the largest private herd) and specialty ranchers/processors; plus the InterTribal Buffalo Council — 82 tribes managing ~20,000 bison on 1M+ acres.[6]
• Deer/elk: several thousand cervid farms and hunting preserves, represented by the North American Deer Farmers Association (NADeFA).[9]
• Camelids, companion animals, worms: thousands of tiny, independent operators; no consolidated ownership and no reliable public ranking.

Downstream buyers give trivial, indirect exposure — e.g., General Mills owns the EPIC Provisions brand that sells bison snacks — but that is a food-company footnote, not a way to own the industry.

5. How the money works

Because the code lumps together unrelated businesses, owners make money in fundamentally different ways.

1) Premium-protein ranching (bison, deer for venison). This is cow-calf economics with a health-food premium. Revenue comes from selling live animals to processors, breeding stock to other ranchers, direct-to-consumer meat, and — for cervids — hunting-preserve fees. Bison sells at a steep premium to beef (retail roughly $9–$22/lb depending on cut) on a lean, grass-fed, "regenerative" story, but the economics are slow and capital-heavy: bison mature more slowly than cattle, land and fencing are expensive, herds grow gradually, and demand persistently outruns supply.[8] The bison meat market is still small — North America was roughly $280M of a ~$412M global market in 2024.[8] Margin drivers are the price premium over beef, forage/land cost, herd-growth rate, and access to the few federally inspected bison processing plants.

2) High-value genetic / niche breeding stock (trophy deer; historically alpacas). Here the animal itself is the product and the value is in genetics. Trophy-antler deer genetics can command large sums per animal; farmed cervids also yield venison, antler velvet (sold as a supplement), and byproducts (urine as a hunting lure, hides). Alpacas were the cautionary tale: a speculative breeding-stock bubble in the 2000s collapsed after 2008, and the national herd has roughly halved since — today it is mostly a lifestyle/fiber pursuit with weak commercial returns.[7]

3) Recurring industrial supply of research animals (the real profit pool). This is the only part with scale, pricing power, and public equity. Breeders sell purpose-bred, genetically defined, health-monitored animals on a recurring basis — high-volume rodents at modest unit prices, plus scarce, expensive research primates — layered with services (engineered models, colony/breeding management, specialty diets, health monitoring). Economics are volume × price, with genuine pricing power in specialty models and non-human primates (NHPs). NHPs are the swing factor: a research macaque went from a few thousand dollars before 2020 to more than $20,000 at the 2022–23 peak as import supply tightened — very high margin, but volatile and legally fraught. The squeeze cut both ways: Charles River's RMS operating margin fell to 13.8% in 2024 from 19.5% in 2023 as primate demand and pricing normalized.[11]

4) Emerging insect protein. Black soldier fly larvae and worms are farmed for animal feed, pet food, aquaculture feed, and fertilizer. Economics favor capital, automation, and process control, but pricing power still depends on cost parity with conventional feed and on customer acceptance — this is an execution- and market-development story, not yet a profit pool.[17][18]

Cost and inventory reality across the code: major costs are feed, bedding, utilities, labor, veterinary care, breeding facilities, environmental controls, transport, and compliance. Biological inventory behaves unlike manufactured stock — breeding cycles cap how fast supply can grow, while disease or mortality can destroy inventory suddenly. Useful operating metrics include survival and breeding rates, genetic consistency, health status, revenue per breeding unit, feed/labor cost per animal, facility utilization, customer concentration, repeat-order rates, inventory days, and compliance incidents.

Bottom line: the ranching and niche-breeding segments are slow-turn, land-locked operating businesses; insects are a capital-and-adoption bet; the research-animal segment is the one that behaves like a scalable, financially analyzable enterprise.

6. What drives demand

Demand is end-market specific.

• Bison / venison: consumer appetite for lean, high-protein, grass-fed, "better-for-you" and regenerative meat; restaurant and grocery distribution; the price premium the story supports. Chronically limited supply — not demand — is the binding constraint.[8]
• Farmed deer/elk: hunting and shooting-preserve demand, the trophy-genetics market, venison, and velvet-antler supplements.[9]
• Laboratory animals: biopharma and biotech R&D budgets, the number of drug candidates in preclinical pipelines, National Institutes of Health (NIH) and academic research funding, growth in engineered models, and outsourcing to contract research organizations (CROs). This is the demand engine for the code's most valuable segment.[10][11]
• Insects: pet food, livestock and aquaculture feed, wildlife nutrition, and fertilizer — an emerging, sustainability-driven channel.[17][18]
• Camelids, companion animals, worms: hobby, fiber, pet, and bait/composting demand — small, fragmented, and not cyclically important.

A major forward-looking counter-current for the lab-animal segment: regulators are moving to reduce animal testing (Section 7). New Approach Methodologies (NAMs) — organ-on-chip systems, organoids, and computational models — are a slow structural headwind to research-animal demand even as biologic pipelines expand.[28]

7. Regulation

This code is unusually regulation-driven for its size, because welfare, disease, and wildlife-trafficking rules bear directly on the animals themselves.

• Animal Welfare Act (AWA), enforced by USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). Dealers, breeders, and research facilities covered by the AWA must be licensed or registered and are subject to inspection. Note a key carve-out: the AWA excludes rats, mice, and birds bred for research — so the highest-volume lab animals are not covered by it, though dogs, cats, and primates are.[19] The cautionary tale: Envigo's Cumberland, Virginia beagle-breeding facility drew 60-plus AWA violations in 2021–22, leading to the surrender of ~4,000 beagles in summer 2022 and a record $35M+ penalty; Envigo/Inotiv pleaded guilty and agreed to never breed or sell dogs again.[26]
• Federally funded research oversight. For PHS-supported work, NIH's Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW) administers the Public Health Service (PHS) Policy covering all live vertebrates — including mice — and institutions must run an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) that reviews and approves animal use.[20] This layer catches what the AWA carve-out does not.
• Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) controls for farmed cervids. CWD — a fatal, prion-based disease with no vaccine and no reliable live-animal test — dominates deer/elk farming. APHIS runs a Herd Certification Program (9 CFR Part 55; national since 2014) requiring fencing, animal ID, inventory, and surveillance; only herds certified low-risk after five clean years may move animals across state lines, and some states restrict or ban cervid farming outright.[27]
• Wildlife-trafficking and import law for research primates. NHP imports run through the Endangered Species Act, the Lacey Act, CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), and U.S. Fish & Wildlife oversight; APHIS also regulates live-animal and germplasm imports via permits, health certificates, inspection, and quarantine.[22] A November 2022 Department of Justice (DOJ) indictment charged Cambodian officials and a major supplier with smuggling wild-caught long-tailed macaques into the U.S. mislabeled as captive-bred, tightening imports and worsening a monkey shortage.[23][24] In February 2023 Charles River disclosed a DOJ subpoena over its Cambodian primate sourcing and voluntarily suspended those shipments, warning the constraint could shave 200–400 basis points off its revenue growth that year.[25]
• Animal-feed and food safety. The FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM) regulates animal food, feed, ingredients, and animal drugs; the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) adds preventive-control and supply-chain rules for covered animal-food facilities — directly relevant to the insect-feed segment.[21] Separately, bison and venison are not "amenable" species under mandatory USDA meat inspection the way beef is; slaughter runs on voluntary, fee-for-service USDA inspection — an added cost and bottleneck for producers.
• The structural shift away from animal testing. The FDA Modernization Act 2.0 (2022) removed the blanket requirement for animal testing in drug development, and in April 2025 the FDA published a roadmap to phase out animal testing — starting with monoclonal antibodies — in favor of NAMs.[28] This is the single most important long-run regulatory factor for the research-animal segment.

Practical implication: because rules turn on species and end market, permits and compliance history must be reviewed facility by facility.

8. Competitive dynamics & consolidation

The residual nature of the code creates deep fragmentation — a dog breeder, a lab-mouse supplier, and an insect producer do not compete in the same market.

• Laboratory animals — concentrated and consolidating. Charles River is the clear global leader in research models; Inotiv/Envigo is a distant, financially troubled second (Chapter 11 in 2026); private JAX, Taconic (Avista-owned), and Marshall round out the field.[11][13][14] Barriers to entry are high: proprietary genetics, biosecurity and health-status track records, regulatory standing, global cold-chain logistics, and scarce NHP import licenses. The strategic trend is vertical integration — bundling animal supply into broader preclinical safety-testing services.
• Insects — capital-favored and consolidating early. Automation, process control, and long-term feed contracts reward scale; corporate backers (Darling, Tyson) are positioning ahead of demand.[17][18]
• Bison — fragmented and supply-limited. Many ranches, a few larger players and processors, tribal herds, and marketing cooperatives; the binding constraint is herd size and processing capacity, not competition.[6]
• Deer/elk — fragmented and contracting under CWD pressure and a state-by-state regulatory patchwork.[27]
• Camelids / companion / worms — fragmented, hobbyist, shrinking or flat. No consolidation dynamic worth modeling.

One analytical trap: public-company segment reporting can make an operator look diversified when its direct 112990 exposure is actually narrow. Scale matters most exactly where customers demand consistent genetics, biosecure facilities, reliable shipping, and regulatory expertise — which is why lab animals and, increasingly, insects consolidate while the rest stays local.

9. Risks

• Biological / disease. CWD is effectively existential for cervid farms; colony biosecurity is critical for lab breeders; NHPs carry zoonotic and reputational exposure. Genetic drift and mortality can destroy biological inventory suddenly.[27]
• Regulatory, legal, and reputational. AWA enforcement can be severe (the $35M Envigo case), animal-rights litigation and activism target research breeders and primate imports, and import bans can choke NHP supply.[26][23] The FDA's move toward non-animal methods is a genuine secular demand risk for the code's most valuable segment.[28]
• Single-source supply chains. Research-primate supply has been concentrated in a few countries (Cambodia, China), exposing it to geopolitics and enforcement shocks.[25]
• Commodity and cyclical exposure. Bison and deer prices, drought, feed costs, and land values swing returns; long production cycles amplify boom-bust (the alpaca bubble is the textbook case).[7]
• Small-scale fragility. Most operators are tiny, undercapitalized, and illiquid — with customer concentration and key-person dependence — and even the industry's number-two lab-animal supplier entered bankruptcy in 2026.[13]
• Data risk. Incomplete federal coverage makes benchmarking and market sizing unusually hard; rely on verified operating data, not published business totals.
• Concentration risk for investors. There is essentially one quality public proxy (Charles River), and research-model breeding is only about a fifth of that company — you cannot get clean, diversified public exposure to this code.[11]

10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public routes (valuation context belongs here):

• Charles River Laboratories (NYSE: CRL) — the only scaled listed way in, but you are buying a diversified drug-development-services company in which research-model breeding (RMS, ~$829M of ~$4.05B revenue) is one segment. Judge it as a life-sciences services stock, not a livestock play.[11]
• Inotiv (OTC: NOTVQ) — a small-cap, post-restructuring special situation; speculative, not a core holding.[13]
• Darling Ingredients (NYSE: DAR) and Tyson Foods (NYSE: TSN) — large diversified companies with small insect-protein arms (EnviroFlight; Protix); a thematic tilt, not direct exposure to the code.[17][18]
• No pure-play bison, deer, alpaca, or pet-breeding equity exists; other public exposure is trivial and indirect (e.g., General Mills' bison snack brand).

Private routes:

• Direct ranch or preserve ownership (bison ranch, deer/hunting operation) — land-heavy, illiquid, hands-on operating businesses, not passive investments.
• Growth capital, venture, acquisition financing, or asset-backed lending to research-model, CRO-services, and insect-production operators.
• Branded "better-for-you" bison protein brands; and farmland/ranchland funds for the underlying land layer rather than the animals.
• Key diligence items: facility permits, animal-welfare and compliance history, mortality and breeding data, customer concentration, working-capital and capex needs, genetic or brand differentiation, and the ability to pass through costs.

Outlook (forward-looking judgment, not reported fact):

• Laboratory animals face a soft near term (biopharma R&D discipline and primate-price normalization pressuring margins) and a slow-moving long-term headwind as the FDA and industry adopt non-animal methods — a structural question about demand, not a cliff, given how central mice and rats remain to biology today.[11][28]
• Insects have technology and sustainability appeal but remain execution- and market-acceptance-sensitive; the winners will be capital-backed and cost-competitive with conventional feed.[17][18]
• Bison looks structurally supply-constrained with steady premium-protein demand, tribal-restoration and regenerative-agriculture tailwinds, and slow herd growth — a durable niche rather than a scalable market.[6][8]
• Farmed deer/elk stay boxed in by CWD and state restrictions, surviving as a genetics-and-preserve niche.[27]
• Camelids, companion animals, and worms remain lifestyle and fragmented — not an institutional opportunity.

Net: treat NAICS 112990 not as one industry but as a filing cabinet. The only drawer worth opening at scale is research-animal breeding — best accessed through Charles River — with the clear understanding that regulation, disease, and the long-term shift away from animal testing are the forces that will decide its value. Focused investments backed by verified operating data beat any attempt to own "all other animal production" broadly.

---

Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau. "2022 NAICS Definition — 112990 All Other Animal Production." https://www.census.gov/naics/?details=112990&input=112990&year=2022
2. U.S. Small Business Administration. "Table of Size Standards (13 CFR 121.201) — NAICS 112990, $2.75 million." 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
3. U.S. Census Bureau. "Economic Census — Understanding NAICS / Industry Classification (establishment- and payroll-based coverage)." 2022. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census/year/2022/guidance/understanding-naics.html
4. U.S. Census Bureau. "Nonemployer Statistics — FAQ (excludes the Animal Production and Aquaculture subsector)." https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/nonemployer-statistics/about/faq.html
5. U.S. Department of Agriculture, NASS. "2022 Census of Agriculture — bison and other livestock inventory." 2024. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022/
6. National Bison Association. "Bison by the Numbers." 2024. https://nationalbison.org/bison-by-the-numbers/
7. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service (ERS). "2022 Census of Agriculture: U.S. llama and alpaca herd decreased by nearly half from 2007 to 2022." 2024. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-detail?chartId=109977
8. Market Report Analytics. "Bison Meat Market Projections 2025–2033 (2024 market size)." 2025. https://www.marketreportanalytics.com/reports/bison-meat-255399
9. North American Deer Farmers Association (NADeFA). "Cervid Farming Economic Impact." https://nadefa.org/cervid-farming-economic-impact/
10. Precedence Research / Grand View Research. "Animal Model Market Size (2024 estimate and forecast)." 2025. https://www.precedenceresearch.com/animal-model-market
11. Charles River Laboratories. "Fourth-Quarter and Full-Year 2024 Results (RMS revenue $829.4M; RMS operating margin 13.8% vs 19.5% in 2023)." Feb. 2025. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250219203289/en/
12. Charles River Laboratories. "Form 10-K (RMS segment description: model production, engineered-model creation, breeding, colony management, diagnostics)." 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1100682/000110068226000022/crl-20251227.htm
13. Inotiv, Inc. "Form 8-K — Confirmation of Plan of Reorganization (July 2026); prepackaged Chapter 11 (June 2026); OTC (NOTVQ)." SEC EDGAR. 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/720154/000162828026048369/notv-20260714.htm
14. Taconic Biosciences. "Company History (acquired by Avista Capital Partners, 2022)." https://www.taconic.com/about/company-history
15. The Jackson Laboratory. "About The Jackson Laboratory." https://www.jax.org/about-us
16. Marshall BioResources. "About / purpose-bred research animals." https://marshallbio.com/
17. Darling Ingredients. "EnviroFlight — Markets (black soldier fly larvae)." https://www.darlingii.com/en/enviroflight/markets
18. Tyson Foods. "Tyson Foods Announces Partnership with Protix for More Sustainable Protein Production." Oct. 2023. https://www.tysonfoods.com/news/news-releases/2023/10/tyson-foods-announces-partnership-protix-more-sustainable-protein
19. USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). "Animal Welfare Act and Animal Welfare Regulations (Bluebook) — coverage excludes rats, mice, and birds bred for research." 2023. https://www.aphis.usda.gov/sites/default/files/ac_bluebook_awa_508_comp_version.pdf
20. NIH Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW). "PHS Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (IACUC oversight)." https://olaw.nih.gov/policies-laws/phs-policy.htm
21. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Center for Veterinary Medicine. "Animal & Veterinary — Animal Food & Feeds (FSMA preventive controls)." https://www.fda.gov/animal-food-feeds
22. USDA APHIS. "Guidance for Importing or Transiting Live Animals (permits, health certificates, quarantine)." https://www.aphis.usda.gov/live-animal-import/guidance-importing-or-transiting-live-animals
23. Science (AAAS). "Indictment of monkey importers could disrupt U.S. drug and vaccine research." 2022. https://www.science.org/content/article/indictment-monkey-importers-could-disrupt-u-s-drug-and-vaccine-research
24. U.S. Department of Justice. "Cambodian Officials and Six Co-conspirators Indicted for Taking Part in Primate Smuggling Scheme." Nov. 2022. https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdfl/pr/cambodian-officials-and-six-co-conspirators-indicted-taking-part-primate-smuggling
25. STAT News / Reuters. "Charles River suspends shipments of research monkeys amid federal probe; discloses DOJ subpoena on Cambodian supply." Feb. 2023. https://www.statnews.com/pharmalot/2023/02/22/charles-river-monkey-macaques-research-cambodia/
26. U.S. Department of Justice / EPA. "Animal Breeding and Testing Company (Envigo) Pleads Guilty to Animal Welfare and Pollution Crimes; Pays More Than $35M." 2024. https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/animal-breeding-and-testing-company-pleads-guilty-animal-welfare-and-pollution-crimes
27. USDA APHIS. "Chronic Wasting Disease Herd Certification Program (9 CFR Part 55)." https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/cervid/chronic-wasting
28. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. "FDA Announces Plan to Phase Out Animal Testing Requirement for Monoclonal Antibodies and Other Drugs" (implementing FDA Modernization Act 2.0). Apr. 2025. https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-announces-plan-phase-out-animal-testing-requirement-monoclonal-antibodies-and-other-drugs