So many cows...

I just spent the afternoon making about 20 or so histograms in Excel all graphing the number of milk cows per county in Wisconsin every 5 years since 1982. Marathon County was leading until somewhere between 1997 and 2002, but for whatever reason dropped down just below Clark County(from 65,857 to 60,591). To put that in perspective, the county's estimated human population in 2008 was 130,962. In 2007 the survey found that Marathon county had 62,840 milk cows. That's only about 2.08 people for every cow. Milk cows. That's not counting beef heads or breeding stock.

But that's not really what I learned from this assignment. I already knew they had a crap-load of cows up there. What I learned is that I hate Excel, and I hate making histograms. Maps are so much more fun to make, and are definitely more impressive when they're done.