Slaughter by province

The view reports the number of animals slaughtered in 2025, by the province where the slaughterhouse is located, exactly as published by the Sistema Informativo Veterinario (vetinfo.it), the statistical portal of the National Livestock Database (BDN) run by the Italian Ministry of Health. Unlike the other BDN views on the map, which are MapTheFood elaborations on base data (ratios, indices, normalisations), this is the direct publication of an official table: there are no intermediate calculations, only the species selection and the drawing on the map. That is why the detail panel marks it as "Official data", not as an "elaboration".

The data is organised into four categories: Cattle and buffalo (aggregated together in the source, which cannot be separated out), Pigs (which include wild boar slaughtered in plants, a category that cannot be separated out), Sheep & goats (the sum of the three BDN recording modes: identified individual animals, unidentified individual animals, batches) and Poultry (which sums chickens and hens, turkeys, pigeons and other poultry species). The figure includes animals of foreign origin slaughtered in Italian plants: the province recorded is that of the slaughterhouse, not the animal's province of origin.

2025 absolute volumes: 2,644,574 Cattle and buffalo, 9,907,372 Pig, 3,044,534 Sheep & goat and 650,738,127 Poultry animals slaughtered (the poultry figure is far higher for reasons of biological scale and production cycle, not because the poultry supply chain is more concentrated than the others). Cattle slaughtering is more territorially distributed: Verona, the top province, accounts for 13.9% of the national total; for Poultry the top two provinces (Forlì-Cesena and Verona) together account for 38.5%, a markedly higher level of geographic concentration. For Pigs the top three provinces (Mantua, Modena, Parma), all in the Po Valley, cover 48.9% of the national total.

Several provinces show no recorded slaughtering for a given species (55 out of 107 for Poultry, 13 for Pigs, 10 for Sheep & goats, 8 for Cattle and buffalo): this does not mean that species is not farmed in that province, it means the province has no authorised slaughtering plant for that species operating (or none at all).

Production is not consumption. This is the most important limit of this view: the number of animals slaughtered in a province does not measure how much meat of that species is consumed in that province. A slaughterhouse is located where there is industrial capacity, supply-chain tradition and proximity to the farms that supply it — not where the product will later be sold or eaten. Once slaughtered, the product enters national distribution and export through large-scale retail chains, cold-chain logistics and wholesale channels: from there it can travel hundreds of kilometres before reaching a shelf or a plate. Forlì-Cesena slaughters a fifth of Italy's poultry, but this does not imply that a fifth of national poultry consumption happens in the province of Forlì-Cesena.

Italy has no meat-consumption figure at this geographic granularity, by province. ISTAT surveys of household food consumption are conducted at national or, at most, macro-regional level (North-West, North-East, Centre, South, Islands), not by province: it is therefore not possible, using official Italian public data, to build a "meat consumption by province" map analogous to this slaughtering map. This is a genuine information gap: no official national source fills it at this level of geographic detail.