CWT stands for “hundredweight,” a unit of weight equal to 100 pounds in the United States and Canada. It’s one of the standard ways agricultural commodities are measured, priced, and traded, especially for livestock, dairy, and bulk crops. The abbreviation comes from the Latin word “centum” (meaning hundred) combined with “weight,” which is why the letter C appears instead of an H.
How Much Is One CWT?
In the U.S., one hundredweight is straightforward: 100 pounds, or about 45.36 kilograms. Twenty hundredweights equal one short ton (2,000 pounds). When American agricultural markets, USDA reports, or farm receipts reference “cwt” without further clarification, they always mean the 100-pound version.
The British imperial system uses a different standard. One “long hundredweight” equals 112 pounds (50.80 kg), based on an older system where it was defined as 8 stone. This distinction matters if you’re reading commodity prices from the UK or trading internationally, but within North American agriculture, cwt always means 100 pounds.
Where CWT Shows Up in Agriculture
You’ll encounter cwt most often in three areas: livestock markets, dairy production, and bulk crop sales.
Livestock is the most visible example. Cattle and hogs are priced per hundredweight rather than per animal or per pound. A steer might sell for $185/cwt, meaning $1.85 per pound of live or dressed weight. This convention makes it easier to compare prices across animals of different sizes and across different market days. When you see auction reports or futures contracts for cattle, the prices are quoted in dollars per cwt.
The dairy industry relies heavily on cwt as well. Milk production costs, farm-gate prices, and government support programs are all expressed per hundredweight of milk. Since a gallon of milk weighs about 8.6 pounds, one cwt represents roughly 11.6 gallons. Dairy farmers track their cost of production per cwt to understand profitability, and federal milk marketing orders set minimum prices using the same unit.
Bulk crops like potatoes, sugar beets, and rice are also commonly sold by the hundredweight rather than by the bushel. This is especially true for commodities that don’t have a standardized bushel weight or that are traded primarily by actual weight rather than volume.
CWT vs. Bushels
The key difference is that cwt is a pure weight measurement, while a bushel is technically a unit of volume (2,150.42 cubic inches) that has been assigned a standard weight for each commodity. A bushel of wheat weighs 60 pounds, a bushel of shelled corn weighs 56 pounds, a bushel of barley weighs 48 pounds, and a bushel of oats weighs just 32 pounds. Because the weight-per-bushel varies by crop, bushels don’t translate neatly across commodities.
CWT eliminates that inconsistency. One cwt is always 100 pounds regardless of what you’re measuring. That’s why commodities that are sold by weight at the point of sale (livestock, milk, potatoes, sugar) tend to use cwt, while grain markets that evolved around volume-based storage and handling still rely on bushels.
How to Convert Pounds to CWT
The math is simple: divide total pounds by 100. If you harvest 45,000 pounds of potatoes, that’s 450 cwt. If your dairy herd produces 62,000 pounds of milk in a month, that’s 620 cwt. To go the other direction, multiply cwt by 100 to get pounds, or by 20 to convert cwt into short tons.
Getting these conversions right is especially important when calculating revenue. If potatoes are selling at $12.50/cwt and you have 450 cwt, your gross is $5,625. Misreading a price quote as per-pound instead of per-hundredweight (or vice versa) would throw your numbers off by a factor of 100.
Why Agriculture Still Uses CWT
CWT has persisted because it hits a practical sweet spot. Individual pounds are too granular for large-volume transactions, and tons are too coarse for the quantities many farms deal with. A hundred-pound increment works well for pricing animals that weigh 500 to 1,500 pounds, for tracking milk output from herds producing thousands of pounds per day, and for selling truckloads of produce without the numbers becoming unwieldy.
It also remains embedded in the infrastructure of American agriculture. USDA market reports, commodity futures exchanges, crop insurance calculations, and federal dairy programs all use cwt as a standard unit. As long as those institutions keep reporting in hundredweights, farmers, buyers, and traders will keep thinking in hundredweights too.