Every five years the Department of Agriculture releases a Census of Agriculture. The latest edition came out on Tuesday, and for some reason I thought it would be interesting to document the decline of the small family farm. Here it is:
There's no decline at all. I've been hearing for practically my entire adult life that small farms are disappearing, but it's not true. It's medium-sized farms that are going away:
Now, it's worth pointing out that if you look at income levels, every size of farm has declined since 1997, even the smallest ones. There's only one exception: farms producing $500,000 or more, whose numbers have skyrocketed 150%.
I don't have anything special to say about this. I'm just filing it under "stuff I didn't know until today."
The “family farms” that have been disappearing are not small farms. Small farms are more often off-farm occupation farms, retirement farms, or low income farms. The midsize- and large- scale family farms are the ones getting squeezed. https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/95547/eib-214.pdf?v=8905.2
Suppose that in 1900 (say), there were 6 million small farms and 4 million big farms. Suppose that now there are 600 small farms and 400 (really) big farms. Would this represent a decline in small farms? Why show a ratio instead of the raw numbers of farms? Sometimes you can't really tell the whole story with one number.
These days 50 acres is probably not a real working farm as jwbates says above. At any rate such a farm is a very different proposition from (say) the 19th century when most people were farmers and may not have have more acres than that.
Yes.
Wheat acreages have long been large. Corn and soybean farms east of the Missouri with livestock might sustain a family with 100-150 acres 50 years ago. "Small family farms" in IA, MN, MS, IL, WI, and IN has realistically meant 100-500 (or more) acres for decades. The "small farm" growth under 50 acres is HOBBY FARM growth.
The first thing that I thought when seeing this was basically, “I’ll bet there are tax incentives to classifying a vacation home as a farm”.
EDIT: I see that someone below confirms this is true
Exactly. "Hobby Farms" is what's led the growth in this category (although anyone who has worked in agriculture even in the smallest of capacities will tell you the idea of farming as a "hobby" and the work you have to put in day in an day out is kind of funny). It seems the only way you can have a profitable venture in ag these days is something that's small enough to keep costs within reason or big enough to make some kind of profit. The middle is what gets squeezed. You see that in the dairy industry in Wisconsin. A lot of family-owned, mid-sized farms have had to consolidate into bigger operations for that very reason. You either have a "hobby" operation which requires you to do something else fulltime or a big operation to be a fulltime farmer because you have to sell in volume which requires a large number of cows and big investments in infrastructure. There's no in between anymore because you can't make money. You can't make enough to pay your costs and banks don't want to lend you money because there's no profit in it. Thus, what was once 53,000 dairy farms in the Dairy State 50 years ago is now down to 6,000
It's not always hobby farming. It's often what they used to call truck farming, producing crops for sale at small scale grocers and farm stands.
Some friends of ours run a farm. It's the oldest continuously operated farm in the county. They specialize in beef as do a lot of local farmers, but they also sell pork and lamb. They both gave up "suit jobs" to farm about 15 years ago. They have a side hustle building spec homes, but their farm is their major source of income.
Several farms have started in our area in the last five years. One is run very professionally by a younger guy who is internet saavy. He has the usual farm shares to help finance operations, runs a 24 hour self-serve farm stand that also offers local bread and fermented items. He has been adding greenhouse space and loves his new soil steamer that lets him rotate more crops. He has a whole team working for him, and there are salad mixes and root crops on offer even in the winter. Another small farm has started with similar goals, but they close for the winter and don't do internet newsletters.
Back in college, I had a hall mate whose family owned a wheat far in Iowa. It was a big operation for its days, but they relied on migrant farm machine operators for their big equipment. They were too small to buy and operate their own million plus equipment. My guess is that the farm was sold long ago or is now leased to a larger operator. It would be classed as mid-size now.
In the 19th century, farmers raged against the railroads and grain elevator operators who sucked most of the profit out of farm production. Now it's the big operators who set the terms and offload the risk. If you want to farm, you can go big and wind up a gig worker or you can go small and accept an intrinsic limit but get most of the rewards of farming including enough to live comfortably on.
Different crops call for different size farms. Grain and cattle tend to call for big farms; we're talking square miles, not acres. I grew up in an area where the farming was fruit trees, and you can make a living from 50 acres of fruit trees, or grapevines. I'm not personally familiar with vegetable or berry farming, but I'm pretty sure that they operate on a similar scale to fruit trees rather than to wheat or corn.
West Sonoma county pinot noir can go for up to $6000/ton with yield of 4 tons/acre so even a 5 acre vineyard can produce almost $100,000 in income though the expenses eat up a good chunk of that. If you can turn it into average wine at $20/bottle and it is more like $250k. And high end labels are getting closer to $60/bottle than they are to $20.
There can be tax benefits to having your property designated as a farm. And I'm not sure how investment farms, I own the land and get a tax break and get a management company to farm it along with all my neighbors, are counted.
Not really sure how big Sam Donaldson's farm was (different Donald):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Donaldson
How big are "factory farms" raising chickens and/or pigs?
OBVIOUSLY we need to CUT TAXES, okay mostly and hugely on large farms and also large corporations and extremely wealthy individuals, but also on FAMILIES JUST LIKE YOU, for a penny or two here or there, and not SPEND IT ON OBAMAPHONES AND WELFARE!!! Also something something BORDER! And IMPEACH!! Now please vote for our tax cuts. And pay no attention to their effect on the DEFICIT!!! OBAMAPHONES AND WELFARE DEFICIT!! Did I mention WELFARE? For Those People?
Not sure about acreage measures, but for dairy farms in Wisconsin, it's the farms with less than 100 head that are disappearing fast.
Sure seems like it's a shift from modestly- sized family farms to a lot of hobby farms. Not all hobby farms are tiny - I know one person with bison, and those need a lot of acres!
Why did you combine 4 sets of data for your 50 - 179 acre farms and 3 sets of data for your 180 - 499 acre farms?
Also, where would one categorize marijuana farms?
Plenty of food to go around. We can reduce farm capacity?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/16/europe-farmers-climate-green-protest-eu
“…the commission was withdrawing a bill to halve the use of chemical pesticides by 2030 and would hold more consultations instead.”
Fewer people in the future means fewer farmers required. Cull the herd now.
So, are 200 acres split between two trusts and an LLC one 200 acre farm in this data, or three smaller ones? Ie, what might the effect of inheritance be on this data?
Up here in the northeast there are lots of little “heritage farms” preserved under easements that really aren’t about mass food production but local tourism and kitschy stuff like petting zoos, hayrides, pick-your-own, seasonal festivals, etc. A few have gone a more food-centric route but are focused on CSA models or organic niche produce + pick-your-own.
Same in Wisconsin too.
There's also been an expansion in Amish and Mennonite farms as well. Big families, sons need farms, older, non-Amish farmers willing to sell, that's how it works.
I live in a rural dairy farming area in northernmost New York. There are lots of small farms around here -- but almost no one I have ever encountered uses the farm as their sole source of income (except possibly among the Amish). It seems that most everyone also works maintenance or construction, or the spouse has full-time employment, or some such other way of generating additional income. Conditions around here are not great for farming compared to many other parts of the US -- I have no idea if the same dynamic applies in Iowa, say. Recently we're starting to see farmers leasing out their fields for solar farms.
I don't know how widespread this trend is but, we know a couple that purchased 20 or 30 acres of land and built a very nice home. They added a 'designer' farm of a couple of acres.
They told me there are nice tax benefits to having a small farm. Meaning, I don't think they make money on the farm. Rather, it was planted for the lifestyle and the tax benefits.
If you drive around rural NJ, you'll see all these chateau-sized mansions on 20 acres of land. They're all "farms" with a few fruit trees and beehives in the back.
There are two ways to make money in farming these days: go big into commodity crops whose prices you can hedge and receive government subsidies for. Or go into small, organic specialty crops or meat raising that farm-to-table restaurants or big-city farmers markets pay top dollar for (and that you can mostly manage yourself w/o high labor costs). If you're trying to run a conventional dairy with only 50 cows or a 50-acre plot of corn or soybeans, you're going to be in the red the rest of your life.
The basic premise that medium scale farming is what is disappearing is even observable at the grocery store. There are a lot more niche hyper-local products at higher price points and then the mass-market brands at lower ones.
A decent portion of the small farm growth may be the adaption of the european market garden intensive cultivation concept into the american suburbs. An acre is about 200 50' long beds (30" beds with 18" paths between them). That is enough to support a decent sized CSA or a few farmers market stalls with a good variety of crops. Those farms also have a couple of green houses in order to get season extension and a more controlled optimized environment. Whether you would call it a small family farm though is questionable.
My dad and I own 80 acres we inherited so we don't have any cost of buying the land. It is medium quality land in north central Kansas. We pay for all taxes, insurance, seed, and fertilizer. We then pay a farmer to farm it. We cleared $12K last year total. The farmer we pay says he clears about the same from what we pay him after his expenses of equipment etc. That would mean at least 300 to 400 acres to make around $40K a year. There are a lot of other factors such as crop, quality of land, price of crop. This is just my arms length example. Farming is a really tough job and has a lot of financial and work injury risk.