Abstract: A survey on farm animals storage was an important part of agricultural survey, the mainly survey method was sampling. The objective of the study was to select a suitable sampling method based on an example to estimate the nationwide cow storage. Second-order PPS(sampling with probability proportional to size) sampling,the stratified proportion sampling and the stratified second-order typical sampling were adopted in the survey on beef cattle storage in the Aohan county, Inner Mongolia, compared the accuracies given by the three methods. The results showed that under the optimal sample size for each of the three methods,the order of the three methods according to the relative error was: the stratified second-order typical sampling＜the stratified proportion sampling＜second-order PPS sampling, and the relative error of the stratified second-order typical sampling was less than the stratified proportion sampling and second-order PPS sampling to 60.38 and 92.83 percent respectively, while the order of the confidence interval was:the stratified second-order typical sampling＜the stratified proportion sampling ＜second-order PPS sampling. Overall, the stratified second-order typical sampling gave the highest accuracy,and the relative error was the smallest. Therefore, in actual application,the stratified second-order typical sampling is the most applicable.

Key words: beef cattle storage; stratified sampling; second-order sampling; typical sampling