What the view shows
Reading the animals-per-hectare-of-UAA ratio by province and region.
This view relates animals registered in the BDN (National Livestock Database, as of 31/12/2025) with the Utilised Agricultural Area (UAA) surveyed by ISTAT in 2020, both aggregated by province and region. The result, animals per hectare of UAA, measures livestock pressure on the agricultural land that must absorb its manure: it is the same logic the Nitrates Directive is built on, which sets the limit for nitrogen spreadable in kg per hectare of agricultural land (170 kg/ha in Nitrate Vulnerable Zones, 340 kg/ha outside them). As with the Density per resident view, each province is shaded within its real administrative boundary: a higher value corresponds to a more intense shade of the same colour used for the selected species.
The figure is available only at province and region level, not municipality level, for the same BDN anonymisation limits already documented for the Density per resident view: municipality-species cells below the threshold are masked and reattributed to the province they belong to, so the animal total used in this view is complete.
Italy records an average of 14.1 animals per hectare of UAA. As with the animals-per-resident ratio, the distribution is uneven: 28 of the 107 provinces exceed the national average. Forlì-Cesena has the highest ratio (154.6 animals/ha, driven by poultry), followed by Verona (147.8), Brescia (73.8), Vicenza (64.9), Padua (63.4) and Bergamo (52.7) — a cluster of provinces concentrated in the Po Valley and Veneto plain. At the opposite end, Barletta-Andria-Trani, Florence, Prato, Aosta Valley, Verbano-Cusio-Ossola and Trapani stay below 1 animal per hectare. At regional level, the highest ratio is in Veneto (64.5 animals/ha), followed by Lombardy (32.9), Friuli-Venezia Giulia (31.9), Molise (30.1) and Emilia-Romagna (23.6).
The comparison with the Density per resident view is instructive: Forlì-Cesena and Verona lead both rankings, a sign that livestock concentration there is high both relative to population and relative to available agricultural land. Molise, by contrast, has a very high animals-per-resident ratio (19.7) but a comparatively lower animals-per-UAA ratio (30.1, below Veneto and Lombardy) — a sign that there, livestock's weight relative to the (small) resident population exceeds its weight relative to the (larger) available agricultural land. These are two readings of the same phenomenon that answer different questions, and should be used together, not one in place of the other.
Limits of the data
What to consider before reading this indicator as a point-in-time measure of environmental risk.
The UAA used is from the 2020 census, animals are as of 31/12/2025: a five-year gap during which a territory's agricultural surface may have changed through urbanisation, land abandonment or crop conversion. The animals-per-hectare-of-UAA indicator built by MapTheFood should therefore be read as an estimate of average provincial livestock pressure, not as a point-in-time measure or as a check of compliance with the regulatory limit of 170/340 kg of nitrogen per hectare, which applies at the level of the individual farm and its Agronomic Utilisation Plan, not at province level.
The animals-per-hectare-of-UAA ratio also does not distinguish between species with very different nitrogen output per animal: an adult bovine produces more nitrogen than a bird, a pig more than a sheep or goat. For this reason the view allows selecting one species at a time, as well as the total: comparing species within the same province is more informative than the aggregate figure alone.