Economic Report on Scottish Agriculture 2015

8.2 Livestock (Table C8)

Chart 8.2 shows the share each country had of the UK population for each of the main livestock groups. Please note, it does not show the share of each nation’s livestock – percentages within each pie chart do not add to 100. Rather it allows us to see which livestock sector each nation was relatively dominant in.

Scotland had a higher share of UK cattle (18 per cent) and sheep (20 per cent) compared to pigs (seven per cent) and poultry (nine per cent).

Chart 8.2: Percentage share of UK livestock, by country, June 2014

Northern Ireland had a similar share to Scotland for cattle, pigs and poultry but with a much lower share for sheep. Compared to Scotland, Wales had a higher share of sheep and a lower share of other livestock groups (including a particularly low number of pigs).

England, naturally, had the highest share of all livestock groups but with a profile opposite to Scotland, with a larger share of the pig and poultry populations in comparison to cattle and sheep.

Chart 8.3 shows the proportion of different types of cattle^[14] within each country. In Scotland, the number of beef cows (constituting 24 per cent of total cattle in Scotland) was larger than the number of dairy cows (nine per cent), contrasting with the profiles in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, where the numbers of dairy outstripped the number of beef cows.

Chart 8.3: Cattle type, by country, June 2014