How the numbers are made

Where every figure comes from, how the percentiles and ranges are computed, and what happens when a county has no data. When we get something wrong, the corrections process is public.

What we measure

Two independent USDA NASS survey series, never blended into one number because they measure different transactions:

• Pasture cash rent ($/acre) — what a landowner charges to lease pastureland outright, from NASS's annual Cash Rents Survey, published to county level, statutorily mandated by the 2008 Farm Bill. Covers 45 states; not every county is surveyed every year.
• Grazing fee ($/animal-unit-month, per cow-calf pair, or per head) — what one rancher pays another to graze cattle on private, non-irrigated rangeland, from NASS's January Cattle Survey. This is a genuinely different lease structure, not a unit conversion of the first.

Why grazing fee only covers 17 states

This isn't a gap in our data — it's how NASS designed the survey. Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming hold roughly 95% of the rangeland actually used for beef cattle grazing in the US. The survey exists to feed the federal grazing-fee formula under the Public Rangeland Improvement Act, which only governs federal (BLM/Forest Service) rangeland — almost all of which is in those 17 states. Pasture cash rent, by contrast, is a normal transaction everywhere in US agriculture, which is why it's tracked nearly nationwide. If you're outside these 17 states asking about a per-head grazing rate, there's no federal survey answer for that specific lease structure in your area — not a bug, a real boundary of what gets measured.

The percentile

Every county's pasture rate gets two percentiles: where it sits among counties in its own state (the comparison that matters most — same climate, same regional market), and where it sits nationally. Every state's grazing fee gets a percentile among the other 16 surveyed states. We use average-rank percentile, which splits ties fairly rather than arbitrarily favoring whichever row happened to sort first.

What the "middle of the market" band is — and isn't

The band on county pages is the 25th–75th percentile of county-level average rents across the state, from the current survey year. It is not the spread of individual leases: NASS publishes one average per county, and lease-to-lease dispersion inside a county is wider than the spread of county averages. Read the band as "where the middle half of county markets sits," not "where most leases fall." The same is true of every percentile on this site — they rank county averages against county averages, which is the only comparison the survey's published data can honestly support.

The counties next door

Every county page lists the counties that physically share its border, each at its most recent published rate. Adjacency comes from the US Census Bureau's county adjacency file (2010 vintage — county borders essentially never change), joined to the survey data by FIPS code. It's there because the comparison ranchers actually make isn't against a state median — it's against the neighbors.

When your county has no listed rate

NASS suppresses results from counties with too few respondents to protect confidentiality, and doesn't survey every county every year. When that happens, we show your county's own most recent available year instead of nothing — always labeled with exactly which year that is, never presented as if it were this year's real number. The typical-range band on every county page is always computed from the current survey year's statewide results and says so, whatever year the county itself last reported. If your county has never once been surveyed, we say that plainly and point you to a same-state comparison instead.

What we don't do yet

• We don't adjust for land quality, carrying capacity, or forage productivity — a county's number is a flat average across everyone NASS surveyed there. Two ranches in the same county can be genuinely different.
• We don't convert between pasture cash rent ($/acre) and grazing fee ($/AUM) — that requires a local stocking rate we don't have a verified source for yet. They're presented as separate benchmarks on purpose, not bridged with a guess.
• State extension custom-grazing surveys (Iowa, Oklahoma) exist but block automated access; not included yet.

Cite us

PastureRents, USDA NASS pasture cash rent and grazing fee benchmark, 2026-10-01. Free to reuse with attribution — CC BY 4.0. License.