Mongolia's Herd Has Stopped Shrinking, But Hasn't Recovered

Mongolia counted 58.1 million head of livestock at the end of 2025, less than 1% above a year earlier and 13 million head below the 2022 peak of 71.1 million. After two years of heavy losses, the national herd has stopped falling. It has not begun to recover.

Two bad years, back to back

The herd fell 9.1% in 2023 and a further 10.9% in 2024, a combined loss of about 13.5 million animals in two winters. The 2024 fall alone is the third-steepest single-year drop in 55 years of records.

Only two episodes were worse. In 2010, the herd fell 25.6% in a single year, from 44.0 to 32.7 million head. Across 1999 to 2002, a run of consecutive bad winters cost 28.8% of the national herd.

Those earlier episodes show how slow recovery is. After the 2010 collapse, the herd took until 2013 to return to its 2009 level: three years to make up one winter.

Sheep and goats took the losses

The damage was not spread evenly across species. Comparing 2025 with the 2022 peak:

Sheep and goats account for nearly all of the loss. Horse and camel numbers actually grew across the same period. Small stock are more vulnerable to deep cold and blocked grazing, and they are also the animals herders sell or slaughter first when fodder runs short.

Since cashmere is a major export earner, a 16% smaller goat herd means less income for herding households well beyond the winter that caused it.

2025: the west still falling, the Gobi growing

The flat national figure hides two opposite regional stories. Among aimags, the largest declines in 2025 were:

• Darkhan-Uul: -35.3%
• Selenge: -22.1%
• Uvs: -11.0%
• Bayan-Ulgii: -9.7%
• Khovd: -8.8%

Meanwhile several Gobi and eastern aimags grew: Umnugovi +16.5%, Sukhbaatar +15.0%, Dornogovi +13.2% and Govisumber +11.6%.

The western aimags (Uvs, Bayan-Ulgii, Khovd) form a contiguous block that was still losing animals in 2025, while the south and east were rebuilding. Darkhan-Uul and Selenge are small-herd farming provinces where the percentage swings look large but the animal numbers are modest.

Fodder costs stayed high

Hay prices give a partial read on how hard the winter was to get through. In December 2025, a bale of hay averaged about 14,700 MNT across the 18 aimags reporting prices, about 5% below the November average.

Prices vary widely by aimag, from 6,000 MNT to 20,000 MNT for a bale in December, and coverage is uneven. In December only 6 aimags reported loose hay prices and 7 reported green feed. That patchiness is a real limitation: the series is best read as a regional spot check, not a national fodder price index.

In the capital, the winter was mild

The one temperature anomaly series we publish covers Ulaanbaatar, not the countryside. Against the 1981-2010 baseline, the capital’s monthly averages ran warmer than normal through the cold season: +0.5°C in December 2025, +2.6°C in January 2026 and +1.1°C in February.

That is a reading from one city, and herding losses happen on pasture hundreds of kilometres away. Read it as context, not as a description of conditions in Uvs or Khovd.

A mild winter is not the same as a safe winter. Warm spells that melt snow and refreeze it into ice over grazing are a classic dzud mechanism, and average temperature is one of the weaker predictors of a bad year for herders.

What these numbers cannot tell you

Dzud is a combination of conditions: a dry summer that leaves animals entering winter underweight, deep or crusted snow that seals off grazing, ice layers over pasture, and herd sizes already beyond what the pasture can carry.

The data on this site covers none of those directly. We hold annual livestock counts, monthly temperatures (five stations in the regional series; the anomaly chart above is Ulaanbaatar only) and patchy regional fodder prices. We do not hold pasture biomass, snow depth, ice cover or summer rainfall.

So these indicators describe what happened to the herd, not how much risk the coming winter holds. Official dzud risk assessments for Mongolia are produced by the National Agency for Meteorology and Environmental Monitoring (NAMEM), which combines the pasture and snow measurements that this kind of forecast requires. Nothing on this page should be read as a risk forecast or a substitute for one.

Explore the data

• Total livestock count, 1970 to 2025, with downloads
• Livestock by type, sheep, goats, cattle, horses, camels
• Hay and fodder prices by region
• Temperature anomaly, Ulaanbaatar

Source: National Statistics Office of Mongolia (1212.mn). Livestock figures are the official year-end census; the 2025 count is the most recent available.