Livestock density per resident

This view relates two different sources: animals registered in the BDN (National Livestock Database, as of 31/12/2025) and ISTAT resident population (as of 1 January 2026), both aggregated by province and region. The result is a simple figure, animals per resident, which allows direct comparison of animal and human presence in the same territory, regardless of the geographic size of the province or region. Unlike the map's other views, here the data is shown as a choropleth map, with each province 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. At municipality level MapTheFood applies an anonymisation threshold to protect small farmers, masking cells with fewer than 5 farms per municipality and species — a threshold that, applied to an animals-per-resident ratio, would produce gaps concentrated precisely in the smallest municipalities, distorting the comparison rather than clarifying it. At province level this limitation does not apply: the masked residual is still recovered and reattributed to the province it belongs to, so the animal total used in this view is complete, not partial.

Italy records an average of 2.96 animals per resident. The ratio is not evenly distributed: in 56 of the 107 provinces, home to 40.5% of the Italian population, the number of animals exceeds the number of residents. Forlì-Cesena is the province with the highest ratio (33.7 animals per resident, driven mainly by poultry), followed by Verona (26.4) and Rovigo (21.4). Prato, Trieste and La Spezia instead record values below 0.05, equivalent to fewer than one animal per twenty residents. At regional level, Molise has the highest ratio (19.7), followed by Veneto (10.3) and Friuli-Venezia Giulia (6.1).

The animals-per-resident comparison is not a measure of environmental impact and does not replace the emissions, nitrate or land-use data covered in the other views. The ratio allows livestock numbers to be compared with resident population, but provides no information on the geographic destination of products.

Animals per resident is a demographic indicator, not an environmental one: it relates two populations, animal and human, on the same administrative territory. It is useful for asking how livestock farming relates to the people who live there: how visible it is in daily life (farm traffic, odours, employment), how much it weighs in the local economy relative to the number of residents, or how concentrated its political and electoral weight is in low-density areas. These are legitimate questions, but different from the environmental one.

The indicator's limit shows up precisely in the extreme values that appear in this view: a high animals-per-resident ratio can come from strong livestock concentration just as easily as, simply, from a depopulated territory. A province with few animals but very few residents can show the same ratio as a province with many animals and many residents, despite having a radically different impact on soil and water. The "resident population" denominator has no connection to the territory's capacity to absorb the nitrogen load of manure: two provinces with the same number of residents can have very different agricultural surfaces.

For the environmental question — whether a territory's livestock farming is sustainable relative to the agricultural land available for spreading manure — the correct normalisation is by Utilised Agricultural Area (UAA), not by resident: it is the criterion the Nitrates Directive itself is built on. MapTheFood presents it in a dedicated view, Livestock density per hectare of UAA, designed to answer this specific question.