An estimation of cattle movement parameters in the Central States of the US

•We estimate the movement parameters of cattle across 10 Central States.•Large USDA data sets were fed into an optimization procedure to extract parameters.•Comparison with other literature suggests a high epidemic risk for US cattle systems.

The characterization of cattle demographics and especially movements is an essential component in the modeling of dynamics in cattle systems, yet for cattle systems of the United States (US), this is missing. Through a large-scale maximum entropy optimization formulation, we estimate cattle movement parameters to characterize the movements of cattle across 10 Central States and 1034 counties of the United States. Inputs to the estimation problem are taken from the United States Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service database and are pre-processed in a pair of tightly constrained optimization problems to recover non-disclosed elements of data. We compare stochastic subpopulation-based movements generated from the estimated parameters to operation-based movements published by the United States Department of Agriculture. Our novel method to estimate cattle movements across large US regions characterizes county-level stratified subpopulations of cattle for data-driven livestock modeling. Our estimated movement parameters suggest a significant risk of a disease successfully invading the US cattle systems.