A quail is a small, round, ground-running bird — the wild bobwhite whistles its own name, bob-WHITE. USDA head-counts quail on farms the same way it counts cows and chickens. At the end of December, which state's farms were keeping the most? Tap the states most-to-least.
Tapping assigns 1→4 in order
Big state, big flock. Texas! 🐾
2Answer
The real order is…
Alabama — 2,426,028 quail, about a quarter of every quail on an American farm. But look what is right behind it: Georgia, with 2,351,420. A photo finish — the two numbers are only about 3% apart (1.03×). And the top four sit side by side: Alabama touches Georgia, Georgia touches South Carolina, South Carolina touches North Carolina. More than three-quarters of America's farm quail stand in that one corner of the map. Texas — the second-biggest state in the country — is only fifth. So the winner is not decided by how much room a state has. Something else is going on — and the first clue is what these birds are for. Penn State Extension lists the major markets for quail as “hunting preserves and field trial stock,” private individuals who buy live birds “to train hunting dogs,” and people “who want to restock birds in the wild.” Not dinner. Whether that is what pulled the farms into this one corner of the map is a question USDA's head-count cannot answer — but it is where you would start looking.
📚 BackgroundA bobwhite quail is a small, round, ground-running bird; the wild one whistles its own name, bob-WHITE. Penn State Extension lists the major markets for farm-raised quail as “hunting preserves and field trial stock; private individuals who buy live birds to train hunting dogs; individuals who want to restock birds in the wild” — restaurants and eggs are secondary. So this head-count is not a count of dinner birds at all. Whether it is also a map of where those buyers live is a fair guess, but not something the table itself says. Meanwhile the wild bobwhite in the same states has gone the other way. Alabama Extension calls it “the prince of game birds” and “the most popular game bird in the south,” says quail once “thrived throughout Alabama, primarily because of land-use patterns,” and then names what changed: “Clean farming practices destroy brushy fencerows and enlarge field sizes, and non-native invasive forage grasses have replaced native bunch grasses,” while “in many forests, dense trees and a lack of periodic prescribed burns have also reduced the habitat available to quail.”(Penn State Extension, “Bobwhite Quail Production”; Alabama Cooperative Extension System, “Bobwhite Quail Management”)↗ (opens in a new tab)
🐕Biscuit's fun facts
📚 Stated as fact by textbooks / public agencies
Alabama's old farm landscape is what made it quail country. Open, plowed farmland was poor ground for deer and turkey, the Encyclopedia of Alabama says, but it created excellent habitat for bobwhite quail: common plowing practices left wide fence rows next to the fields, and those strips, along with fallow (resting) fields, were ideal for quail. Plantation owners copied wealthy European landowners and hunted them with pointing dogs: a bird that freezes until a hunter almost steps on it is a bird a dog can point at.
Then the ground changed. Alabama Extension's list: clean farming destroyed the brushy fencerows and enlarged the fields, non-native forage grasses replaced the native bunch grasses, and in many forests, dense trees and a lack of periodic prescribed burns reduced the habitat available to quail. Why does that matter to a bird? Quail scratch poorly, so their food has to sit on relatively bare soil in open-structured vegetation — seeds buried under deep leaf litter might as well not be there.
Note: this is a head-count of quail kept on farms at the end of December, from USDA's 2022 Census of Agriculture — a count taken once every five years. Wild quail out in the fields are not in this number. USDA NASS. USDA printed a quail figure for 46 states. The other four — New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington — are withheld because publishing their figures would reveal information about individual farms. Everything those four could hold together is far smaller than any of the top five states, so the top five places in this ranking are national positions. Further down, where the numbers get small, a withheld state could sit anywhere, so read the tail as the order among the states with a printed number.
USDA printed a quail figure for 46 states. The other four — New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington — are withheld because publishing their figures would reveal information about individual farms. Everything those four could hold together is far smaller than any of the top five states, so the top five places in this ranking are national positions. Further down, where the numbers get small, a withheld state could sit anywhere, so read the tail as the order among the states with a printed number.
Source: USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (2022 (Census of Agriculture))
Sources
Data as of: 2022 (Census of Agriculture)
USDA NASS Quick Stats: QUAIL - INVENTORY, 2022 Census of Agriculture, by state↗ (opens in a new tab) (2026-08-20) — Published values only (the committed raw file holds the API response verbatim). The Census of Agriculture printed a quail figure for 46 states; the other four — New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington — are withheld because printing their figures would give away information about individual farms. Everything those four could hold together is far smaller than any of the top five states, so the top five places in this ranking are national positions — a check this site re-runs on every build. Further down, where the numbers get small, a withheld state could sit anywhere, so read the tail as the order among the states with a printed number.
↳ In Quick Stats, pick QUAIL / QUAIL - INVENTORY, Census year 2022, Total domain, and compare states.