# What DICOSE is

Every year, everyone in Uruguay who holds livestock tells the state how many animals they hold. Not roughly. Under oath.

The oath is the **Declaración Jurada de Existencias** (the sworn declaration of stock), and the office that receives it is **DICOSE**, the División de Contralor de Semovientes of the Ministerio de Ganadería, Agricultura y Pesca (MGAP). The ministry's livestock information system, **SNIG** (Sistema Nacional de Información Ganadera), publishes the declarations each year on the national open-data catalogue, aggregated so that no single holder can be seen, as a folder of semicolon-separated files in Latin-1. This graph holds two of those years: the declaration years (*ejercicios*) **2024** and **2025**.

The datasets, as the catalogue names them:

- *Datos actualizados Declaración jurada de Existencias DICOSE – SNIG 2024* (publisher MGAP, modified 2026-06-10);
- *Datos Actualizados de la Declaración Jurada de Existencias DICOSE – SNIG 2025* (publisher MGAP, modified 2026-06-17).

Both are published under the Licencia de Datos Abiertos – Uruguay. Every number this guide quotes comes from them, and the source graph of `uruguay-cows` records which file, by name and sha256, each observation came from.

## What is declared

A holder files forms (A1 for the establishment, its land and its herd; A3 to A6 for the detail by species, with the milk in A3 and A6), and SNIG rolls them up. The published tables, and what cow-tools made of each:

| File | What it holds | In the graph as |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `datosgenerales.csv` | per group of holders: total and livestock hectares, livestock units, number of holders | `cow:GeneralHoldingObservation` |
| `datosanimales.csv` | animals per species, with births, deaths and animals consumed on the farm | `cow:AnimalFlowObservation` |
| `datosanimalesdetallados.csv` | animals per species **and category** (bulls, breeding cows, steers by age, calves; milking cows, dry cows) | `cow:AnimalCategoryStockObservation` |
| `usotierra.csv`, `tenenciatierra.csv`, `mejoramientostierras.csv` | hectares by land use, by tenure, by improvement | land observations |
| `produccionleche.csv`, `produccionlecheestablecimiento.csv` | litres of milk produced, and processed on the farm | milk observations |
| `codigos*.csv` | the code lists: departments, species, categories, activities, strata | SKOS concepts |

A "group of holders" is one combination of department, police section (*seccional policial*), enumeration area (*área de enumeración*, the census geography of MGAP's statistics office DIEA), activity, line of business (*giro*), legal nature, size stratum, MGAP specialization and production type. That is the finest grain published: about 537,000 observations a year, none of them a farm.

## The species

1 beef cattle (*bovinos*), 2 sheep (*ovinos*), 3 horses (*yeguarizos*), 4 goats (*caprinos*), 5 pigs (*suinos*), 10 poultry (*aves*, in the code list only), 11 dairy cattle (*bovinos de leche*). Uruguay's cattle are species 1 plus species 11. MGAP itself says the pig, goat and horse counts are included "as a reference", without its quality controls.

## What it is not

It is not a register of animals. There are no ear tags, no owners, no movements, no DICOSE numbers in the public files, and cow-tools refuses any source that carries one (its ingest checks every column header before a single triple is written). If you need an individual cow, you need a different country's open data, or a farm.

## Why anyone would want to know this much about Uruguay

Uruguay has about 3.4 million people and, in 2025, 12,265,269 head of cattle: some three and a half cows per person, each of them sworn to. The country also counted 2,736 cattle in the department of Montevideo, which is mostly a capital city. The curated tools will tell you where each of the others is, by category and by enumeration area, and the guide called *Questions with exact answers* shows how.

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*This guide is by Sophia Labs, under CC BY 4.0. The data it describes is MGAP's (and, for the catalogue, each publisher's), under the Licencia de Datos Abiertos – Uruguay.*

The cow-tools guide, The guide: https://cow-tools.sophia-labs.com/guide/what-is-dicose/ (this page for people) · the whole guide: https://cow-tools.sophia-labs.com/guide/index.md · in Sophia: the graph `cow-tools-guide`, document `what-is-dicose` (MCP `read_document` at https://cow-tools.sophia-labs.com/mcp). CC BY 4.0, credit "cow-tools, Sophia Labs".