An emu is a bird from Australia that stands taller than most grown-ups and cannot fly at all. Some American farms keep them — and USDA counts them like cattle and hens. Which states keep the most emus? Tap them most-to-least.
Tapping assigns 1→4 in order
Giant bird, giant state. Texas! 🐾
2Answer
Among the states USDA lists, the order is…
North Carolina — 5,218 birds, about 4.25× as many as Texas, and roughly 2 out of every 5 emus on American farms. Here is the trap. Texas really does lead — in emu farms: 273 of them, more than any other state. But the average Texas emu farm keeps fewer than 10 birds, while the 49 emu farms in North Carolina average more than 100 each. Count the places and Texas wins. Count the birds and North Carolina wins by a mile.
📚 BackgroundAn emu is an Australian bird that stands taller than most grown-ups and cannot fly at all. It is also, on USDA's books, an American farm animal: emus get counted like cattle and hens. And the count comes with a trap. The state with the most emu farms is Texas. The state with the most emus is North Carolina, where a much shorter list of farms keeps much bigger flocks. Same birds, same table, two different winners — it depends on whether you count the places or the animals.(USDA NASS Quick Stats)
Note: emus counted on farms at the end of December 2022, from USDA's Census of Agriculture — the count of every farm in the country, taken once every five years. Emus living wild in Australia are not in this table. USDA NASS. USDA published an emu figure for 44 states; the other six have no number here — two are withheld because too few farms keep emus to print a figure without giving those farms away, and four are simply not in the table. Each of the 37 states shown is bigger than all six of them added together, so this really is the national order.
USDA NASS Quick Stats: EMUS - INVENTORY, 2022 Census of Agriculture, by state (2026-08-14) — Published values only (the committed raw file holds the API response verbatim). The Census of Agriculture published an emu figure for 44 states; the other six have no number here — two are withheld because too few farms keep emus to print a figure without giving those farms away, and four are absent from the table. Everything those six states could hold together is smaller than the smallest of the 37 states shown, so this order holds nationally — a check this site re-runs on every build.
↳ In Quick Stats, pick EMUS / EMUS - INVENTORY, Census year 2022, Total domain, and compare states.