Yes, There Really Are More Cows than People in Iowa

I had never really done the math before, but this sounded right. I saw a claim that there are more cows in Iowa than people and confirmed that is indeed the case.

I've learned the hard way to not always believe things I see shared on Reddit. That's why I did a double-take on a share there that claimed we are outnumbered by bovines here.

If you look closely at the map, you'll see it was created based on data from Beef2Live so I went to their site to see where they got their numbers from. There are only 9 states where this is true and yes, Iowa is one of them:

South Dakota
Nebraska
Montana
North Dakota
Wyoming
Kansas
Idaho
Iowa 
Oklahoma

Their chart shows that there are only 3,090,416 of us humans in the state while there are 3,700,000 cows. Heifers for the win I guess.

The highest percentage of cows to people goes to South Dakota where cows outnumber humans by a ration of over 4 to 1. Nebraska isn't much better (I could stop right there) with triple the cows to people.

I have to credit this Reddit person. While some posters might be off their rockers with inaccurate theories, this person nailed it. We are cow-intensive in Iowa and dang proud of it, too.