Housing Prices and Dairy Plants
February 6, 2021 Updated: March, 8th 2025
Answering the question no one asked.
How do housing prices relate to the number of dairy plants in a state? I initially wanted to do just cheese plants, but the USDA only provides info on 14 states' cheese production. They're ranked below, by tons.
Total Cheese (Excluding Cottage Cheese) Production 2019
- Wisconsin:
- 1,681,932
- California:
- 1,270,651
- Idaho:
- 504,033
- New Mexico:
- 478,251
- New York:
- 416,105
- Minnesota:
- 365,206
- Pennsylvania:
- 216,091
- South Dakota:
- 173,838
- Iowa:
- 166,966
- Ohio:
- 113,408
- Oregon:
- 105,572
- Vermont:
- 72,573
- Illinois:
- 40,222
- New Jersey:
- 28,903
Where did the map data come from?
Housing prices are by county, from Zillow [1]. Follow the link and it's the first item in the first drop down. The dairy plant numbers are by state, from the USDA [2]. Not sure what the usage rights are for the dairy data, but I pay taxes, so it's probably ok.
Why no legend?
It would be tricky because I'm representing two variables with one color scale. This should really be a bivariate choropleth, but that isn't what past-me chose to do, so now here we are. Best I can offer is to explain how the data gets dumped into the map. First, I normalize housing prices and dairy plants, take the cube root of each, multiply housing by 2 and add it to dairy plants, normalize again, then subtract the whole thing from 1.
Basically, mess with the formula till the colors look nice.